The lifecycle of a .QA domain name

.QA is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) in the domain name system (DNS) for Qatar. The domain life cycle of .QA is similar to .AE and also has four stages.

• Availability
• Registration
• Expiration (29 days) / Redemption (24 hrs)
• Deletion (2-3 days)

.QA is an unrestricted domain that any person or company can register from any country. The whole process of registration is real-time & online. There is also an international domain name (IDN) in Arabic, written as قطر. The subscription time of the .QA domain is one year to 5 years. Most of the registrar provides three years of maximum subscription for the .QA domain But AEserver will provide you a maximum of five years of subscription for .QA domain.

Once the period of the domain you have registered is over, you will need to renew your .QA domain with your current registrar. The domain name is renewable in 1-year intervals (upto five years). If you’re going to continue doing business in Qatar (with or without a local presence), setting up your domain to auto-renew probably makes more sense. You will have two options to renew your domain, manual and automatic renewal. The registrar will renew your domain for you in automatic renewal (this applies if you have an existing card on file where the payment will be auto charged or if you enabled the recurring payment on your paypal dashboard), while a manual renewal requires you to do the renewal by yourself (in case you have an expired card or choose a bank transfer payment option). Don’t worry if you opt for manual renewal; as the expiration time is getting nearer, AEsever sends out reminders to the customers to renew their domains.

If you don’t renew your domain before the expiration period, your domain will go into the expiration stage, where the domain will be on hold for 29 days but will be removed from DNS. During this, you can renew your domain without any extra charges.

Once it reaches the 30th day it will go to the redemption/restore period and you’ll have to pay an extra cost to complete the renewal. After the 30th day it will go into the expired purge stage and will not be available to renew. In this stage, your domain will drop in 2 to 3 calendar days and will be available for registration once again. Note that the domain re-registration is on a first-come, first-serve basis.