Managing domains and hosting for dozens of client sites across different registrars and hosts used to mean tracking renewal dates in a spreadsheet, which worked right up until it did not. A missed renewal on a client’s live site is the kind of mistake that is completely avoidable and completely unacceptable, so I built a workflow to make it structurally impossible to miss one.
The problem with tracking it manually
Every registrar and host sends renewal reminders on its own schedule, in its own format, to whichever email happened to be used when the account was set up. With enough clients and vendors, this becomes a scattered mess across inboxes that nobody reliably checks every day.
What I built
A central source of truth.
Every domain and hosting account now lives in one tracked list, with renewal date, vendor, client, and cost, regardless of which registrar or host it actually sits with.
An n8n workflow that checks daily.
A scheduled workflow runs each morning, checks upcoming renewal dates against today, and flags anything within a set window, currently 30, 14, and 3 days out.
Slack alerts, not email.
Instead of relying on email, which gets buried, flagged renewals post directly into a dedicated Slack channel the team actually watches, with the client name, vendor, cost, and days remaining.
Margin tracking built in.
Since we resell some hosting and domains at a margin, the same record tracks cost versus what the client is billed, so renewal reminders double as a margin check.
What changed after this went live
Renewal tracking went from a recurring source of low-grade anxiety to something nobody thinks about until Slack tells them to. No missed renewals since it launched, and the time spent manually checking registrar dashboards dropped to essentially zero.
What I would improve next
Right now the master list is updated manually when a new domain or hosting account is added. The next step is connecting registrar APIs directly where available, so new accounts populate the tracker automatically instead of relying on someone remembering to add them.