The lifecycle of a .ae domain

.ae is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) in the domain name system (DNS) for the United Arab Emirates. The domain life cycle of .AE has four stages.

• Availability (anyone can register)
• Registration
• Expiration (30 days)
• Deletion (purge) (1-3 days)

Any person or company from any country can register for the available .ae domain. The minimum subscription of .ae domain is one year, and the maximum is five (5) years. Most of the registrar provides just like AEserver will provide you a maximum five years of subscription for .ae domains.

Once the period of the domain you have registered is over, you will need to renew your .AE domain with your current registrar. The domain name is renewable in one-year intervals (upto five years). If you’re going to continue doing business in the UAE (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. AEserver 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, AEserver 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 30 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 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 – just like a new domain name registration.

Good to Know: Unlike with some gtlds, it is actually possible to transfer a .ae domain name while it is in its expired state, as long as the renewal is ordered during this time. This means that if your existing .ae domain name is expired with another registrar, you can still order a domain name transfer that will transfer and renew your domain name at the same time. This is very useful incase that you do not wish to continue with your current provider.