[kijin]

Hotmail.co.uk currently has an expiry date of 23-Oct-2015, only three weeks away. I hope they don't forget to renew it this time...

Google.com should be fine until 2020, but I randomly looked up some of their ccTLDs and a lot of them are set to expire in less than a year. Google.co.uk has only four months left.

I wonder why large companies with deep pockets don't just register all of their domains for the maximum duration. There are a few ccTLDs that only allow 1-2 year renewals, but those are few and far between. Most domains can be renewed for 5-10 years at a time.

[EwanToo]

The oddity of the situation is that the longer you register a domain for, the more likely you are to forget about it's renewal..

However, most big companies use someone like Netnames, MarkMonitor, etc, who simply wouldn't let a domain drop, even if nobody asked them to renew it - instead they'll renew it themselves, keep it active, and simply add it to the next invoice.

[kijin]

Even so, it seems unnecessarily risky for MarkMonitor et al. to renew their customers' domains one year at a time, often at the last minute, instead of keeping a comfortable buffer of two or more years.