What Time Of Day Do Domains Expire?

I’ve been pondering what time of day domains actually drop. So I decided to run a study against 10,000 expiring domains. I set the program up the day before, loaded a list of 10,000 domains that were set to expire the next day. The script kept “breaking.” I dug into why it stopped/crashed shortly after 2 hours after I went to bed. So then I realized the insane restrictions on domain APIs. So I scaled down to check 1,000 domains, and again, another day of mixed and inaccurate results because of API issues.

So I just got impatient and tried about 35 domains to see if I could get a result. I then realized that wasn’t enough, so I did it yet again, on 75 days. About a week later after starting, I finally have some data. All domains were checked within every 70 seconds, so this is correct almost to the minute. There were 3 extensions I primarily checked. Those being com, net and org. I also checked one or two from cc and tv that I’ll also show.

While there’s not much data here, I think there’s enough to draw some conclusions. If there’s interest, I’ll try again with a larger data set. If you’re interested in that, please write in the comments.

The time stamps below are EST (-5), not EDT (-4), even though as I write this article we are in daylight savings time. My server was in EST.

com domains

Expiry times for .com domains.

net domains

Expiry times for .net domains.

Notice how one .org domain expired very early in the morning while the others came later. I did other tests where I noticed a similar behaviour for .org domains. Some expire around midnight, or just after, EST.

org domains

Expiry times for .org domains.

expiry time graph for cc

Expiry times for .cc domains.

expiry time graph for tv

There was one domain that got in the mix that was a .tv. Yes, I know this didn’t need to be made into a graph for just 1 point, but my the script I made did it in milliseconds. 🙂

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