Delete, quarantine and reactivate

Deletions

In order to delete a domain name, you always have to enter a ‘delete date’. The domain name will be deleted on this day at a randomised time. Deletions are scheduled every hour. The effective deletion of a domain name over the day is randomised to balance the load. When you schedule a deletion for a date in the past or for the current date, the time will be randomly spread over the remaining hours of the current day.

Every first day of the month, all domain names with an expiration date in the previous month (i.e. the anniversary date of the registration of that domain name), are automatically renewed and invoiced to the registrar. If you don’t want to pay for a domain name your customer does not want you to renew, you’d better delete it from the database. However, it is the responsibility of the registrar to verify it is indeed the intention of the registrant not to continue the right of use of that domain name.

Unless you have an explicit request from the registrant to delete his domain name, it is best practice to wait with the deletion until the end of the right of use period in order to keep the domain name alive as long as the client expects it to be. As your customer has a one-year contract for the use of the domain name, deleting it before the expiration date might breach the contract. Also, you should keep in mind it is possible the domain name will be transferred to another registrar by the end of the right of use period. The expiration month can be found via the Web interface or EPP.

On the day of the deletion, the domain name is put into a quarantine period of 40 days. After the quarantine period the domain name is released and available for registration. You can always reactivate the domain name during the quarantine period as explained below.

Quarantine

A domain which is deleted at the specified ‘delete date’, will be put ‘in quarantine’. While a domain name is in quarantine, it will not be available for registration. This was set up to protect the registrant against an unwanted deletion, e.g. because he forgot to pay the renewal fee.

A domain name in quarantine cannot be updated. There are only 2 transactions which can be executed for a domain name in quarantine. This is the ‘reactivate domain’ (Web, EPP) and the ‘transfer from quarantine’ (Web, EPP). However, it is still possible to update the contacts associated with the domain name.

As long as a domain name is in quarantine, the DNSSEC data will be remembered. In case the domain name is reactivated (see below), it will be added to the .be zone with the same DNSSEC data as before. When the domain name is freed, the DNSSEC data will be lost.

Reactivate

A domain name in quarantine can be reactivated by the registrar who has executed the delete transaction, as long as the 40-day quarantine period has not expired. See the ‘reactivate domain’ transaction (Web, EPP) on how to do this.

The reactivate transaction will restore the domain name as it existed before it was deleted. However, a new one-year right of use period will start at the moment of reactivation. This means the domain name can have a different ‘invoice month’ than before.