Domain monitoring and SSL alerts before anything expires

SSL certificates and domain registrations expire on a fixed date. If nobody renews them, the site stops working that day. Barkme is domain monitoring with SSL alerts built in: it checks both dates every day and warns you well before either one runs out.

What is checked

Once a day, Barkme checks two dates for every domain you have verified:

• The SSL certificate. Barkme connects to your domain and reads when the certificate it serves expires. An expired certificate does not take the server down. Every browser shows a full-page security warning instead, and most visitors leave.
• The domain registration. Barkme reads the registration expiry date from the registry over RDAP, the protocol that replaced WHOIS. An expired domain is worse than an expired certificate. The website, the API and every email address on that domain stop working together.

The two dates are tracked separately. A certificate that renews every 90 days and a domain that renews once a year each get their own countdown.

You verify a domain once, with a single TXT record that usually takes about two minutes to add. After that, the expiry checks run on their own. There is nothing to schedule, and nothing to remember.

The 30, 14, 7 and 1-day warning schedule

You get a warning 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before either date. Each threshold fires once, so you are not nagged every day for a month. A warning names the domain, says which date is coming up (the certificate or the registration) and gives the exact expiry date in your team's timezone.

The schedule is built around how renewals really go wrong:

• 30 days is enough time to fix the hard problems: an expired card at the registrar, an account nobody has the password for, a renewal that needs a purchase order.
• 14 days catches the renewal that someone said they would do and then forgot.
• 7 days is the point where it has to happen this week.
• 1 day is the last chance before visitors start seeing errors.

When you renew, the next daily check picks up the new date and the warnings start over for the next renewal. If you would rather not get warnings for a domain, you can turn the SSL warnings and the domain warnings off separately, without touching the rest of its monitoring.

Alerts where you will actually see them

A warning is only useful if somebody reads it. Expiry warnings go to the channels you already use:

• Email, to the people who should hear about it.
• Slack, so the whole team sees the warning in one room and one person can say they will handle it.
• Telegram, for the founder who checks their phone before their inbox.
• A signed webhook, for anything custom. Every request carries an X-Barkme-Signature header, an HMAC-SHA256 of the timestamp and the body, so your endpoint can prove the message came from Barkme.

Linear and Trello are for incidents rather than reminders. If a certificate does expire and the site starts failing, the incident that opens can file an issue or a card there.

Why registrar renewal emails get missed

Most registrars and certificate providers do send reminders. The trouble is where those reminders go.

They go to the address that was on the account the day the domain was bought, which might be a former employee, an agency that has since moved on, or a personal address nobody checks for work. They come from automated senders that spam filters treat with suspicion. And they look just like the marketing email the same registrar sends every week, so people learn to ignore them.

The worst case is a domain that expires and takes its own email with it. The registrar's "final notice" messages then go to a mailbox that no longer receives mail. The warning that matters most is the one that can't arrive.

Barkme works the other way round. The warnings go to channels your team chose for alerts, to addresses and rooms you control. They come from outside your domain, so they still arrive if the domain itself has lapsed.

If one expires anyway

The warnings are the first layer. The second is your monitors. Barkme counts a TLS failure on any hop as down, so if a certificate does expire, every monitor on that domain starts failing. An incident opens within minutes, and you hear about it through every channel you have connected, rather than days later from a customer.

A lapsed domain is less obliging. If the name stops resolving, the monitors fail and an incident opens. But a registrar parking page that answers 200 looks up to any check that reads status codes, which is why the registration warnings start 30 days out.

How Barkme compares

Here is what two other tools that rank for domain and SSL monitoring say on their own feature pages (checked October 2026). Where a page doesn't say, the cell reads "not stated".

HostTracker checks more often and has more alert channels. Barkme gives you one more warning step, includes expiry checks on the Free plan, and signs every webhook. It also ties the warnings to uptime monitoring on the same domain, so a certificate that slips through still opens an incident.

On every plan

Expiry checks are included on every plan, Free too. The Free plan covers one verified domain with email alerts. Founder and Pro add more domains, Slack and Telegram, and Pro adds the signed webhook.

Want to see where a domain stands right now? The free domain health check shows its certificate and registration expiry, DNS and blocklist status in one go, with no account needed. To be warned before anything runs out, verify the domain and leave the daily check running.