Error guide / clientHold (domain suspended)
clientHold: domain suspended
clientHold is a domain status code, not a website error. When it is set, the registrar has asked the registry to remove your domain from the DNS zone, so the domain stops resolving anywhere: no website, no email, no subdomains, on any device and any network. Visitors get a DNS failure such as DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN or "server not found" instead of a page from your server, while your hosting account keeps running untouched. serverHold looks identical from the outside, but it is set by the registry itself rather than by your registrar.
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What causes it
By far the most common cause is an unpaid or failed renewal: the card on file expired, the invoice went to an address nobody reads, and the registrar parked the domain a few days after expiry. The second most common cause is ICANN contact verification: for gTLDs like .com, .org and .net, a new registration or any change to the registrant email triggers a verification email, and if nobody clicks the link within 15 days the registrar is required to suspend the domain, which is why a fully paid domain can suddenly go dark. Less often it is an abuse complaint (phishing, malware, spam, or provably false contact data) or a payment chargeback on the registration. serverHold is rarer and comes from the registry, usually after a court order, a UDRP or URS decision, or a registry policy breach.
How to fix it
- Run the check on this page for your domain and read the Statuses line: it shows the raw status tokens the registry publishes, so you will see clientHold, serverHold, redemptionPeriod or pendingDelete exactly as they are set, together with the expiry date and the registrar name. If none of those hold statuses appear, the domain is not suspended and your outage has a different cause.
- Match the token to who can lift it. clientHold was set by your registrar and only your registrar can remove it. serverHold was set by the registry, so the registrar has to escalate it and the underlying legal or policy issue usually has to be resolved first. clientTransferProhibited on its own is normal and harmless, it is just a transfer lock and does not affect resolution.
- If the expiry date has passed or is only days away, log in to the registrar account, meaning the company you bought the domain from, not your hosting control panel, and pay the renewal. Check the billing card on file and search your spam folder for the renewal notices. Most registrars lift clientHold automatically within minutes to a few hours after payment clears.
- If the domain is paid and clientHold appeared anyway, this is almost always the ICANN verification email. Open the contact or registrant settings at your registrar, confirm the registrant email address is one you actually receive mail at, then resend the verification message and click the link in it. The suspension is lifted as soon as the address is verified.
- If the status is redemptionPeriod, the domain is already deleted and can only be brought back through the registrar's restore procedure, for a redemption fee that is typically 10 to 15 times the renewal price and available for about 30 days after deletion. If the status is pendingDelete, restore is no longer possible: the domain is released to the public in about five days, so plan either to catch it at drop or to move to a new name.
- While a hold is active, do not change nameservers, reinstall the site, or clear server and browser caches, none of that reaches a domain that has been removed from the zone. After the status is cleared, re-run the check here until the hold token is gone, then flush your local DNS cache and allow up to a couple of hours for resolvers to pick the domain up again.