Never let an SSL certificate or domain expire by surprise

Why expiry still catches people out

Certificates are supposed to renew themselves, and usually do — until a DNS change, a moved server, a changed payment card or a forgotten hosting account silently breaks the renewal. Nobody notices for weeks, then the certificate lapses on a Saturday. Domain registrations fail the same way: the renewal card on file expires and the reminder goes to an inbox nobody reads.

What OwlHound does

• SSL certificates. We read the certificate your site actually presents, about once an hour, and track the days remaining. When 14 days or fewer are left you get an email, repeated daily until it is fixed.
• Domain registrations. Once a day we look up the registration expiry date and email you at 30, 14 and 7 days before it lapses.
• Everything in one weekly report. Each report shows the days remaining on every certificate and domain you monitor, as progress bars, so renewals are visible long before they are urgent.
• A broken certificate is an outage. If a certificate is invalid or expired, the uptime check fails with a clear "SSL/TLS error" cause, and you are alerted like any other outage.

Good to know

Domain expiry data comes from public registration records (RDAP). A few country-code domains don't publish expiry dates, in which case we can't report them and say so rather than guessing. Certificate monitoring covers the certificate served on port 443 for the host you add.