[Biganon]

You can usually automate the renewal or buy for a long period.

But mistakes can never be completely avoided.

What if you accidentally transfer this domain to someone instead of another domain you sold them? What if you accidentally lose access to the registrar's website? What if.....

[ryanbrunner]

I actually had this happen to me. My credit card was compromised, the domain (which was registered 10 years ago) was tied to an old e-mail I never use, so I never got payment failure alerts, and didn't notice it was expired until a few days after I stopped receiving e-mails and the domain had been bought by someone else.

It's a huge pain to deal with, since it's 100% unrecoverable since there's no one to really appeal to and you're just forced to update your e-mail everywhere.

[arp242]

Many (though not all) TLDs employ a "grace period", where the domain stops working but you have some time (usually 30 days) to renew it before it's really de-registered. This is to prevent exactly these types of scenarios.

[ziml77]

I had a similar issue where I didn't get the renewal failure emails. Fortunately no one else grabbed the domain, but there was a window of a week where someone could have! I still use my own domain for my email, but I can't help but feel like maybe it's not the best idea.