The Redemption Period is a 30 day, Registry-imposed hold period for domains that occurs after the registrar has instructed the Registry that the domain should be dropped. Domains will have reached the REDEMPTION PERIOD state if they have been EXPIRED for at least 40 days, were NOT renewed by the owner, and the drop domain process has run. Normally domains would be deleted at this point, but the REDEMPTION PERIOD provides the owner with one last chance to recover the domain before it's dropped and potentially re-registered by a new owner. It is a new policy started by ICANN and the Registry Operator, Verisign:
http://www.icann.org/registrars/redemption-proposal-14feb02.htm
The Redemption process is costly, both in fees and in effort. Registrants should be discouraged from using the Redemption Period and encouraged to renew domains before expiry or during the grace period when a renewal can be conducted with the registry in real time and for no additional cost.
Domains are still deleted from our database at the 40-day mark, and if you are interested in getting this domain name back, here is what it will take:
- The domain can only be reverted back to the original Registrant (original whois information).
- It will take approximately 2-3 business days to complete the entire process.
-The redemption fee is currently $100 plus the cost of renewing the domain, but this is subject to change without notice.
Of course, there is always the option of waiting out the entire grace period, which would be approximately 40(Post Expiry Grace period) + 30(Redemption Period) + 6(Pending Delete period) = 75 days. We do not recommend this, however, because more and more we see seemingly undesirable domains (by anyone but you) snapped up for their traffic.
