How Do Drupal Developers Manage Their Clients’ Domains?

Drupal domain management can become surprisingly complicated when a developer or small web agency manages dozens or hundreds of client websites. Domains, DNS records, SSL certificates, renewals, expiration dates, payments, and different registrars all have to be tracked and maintained.

I have a practical question for Drupal developers and small web agencies.

If you build and maintain websites for clients, sooner or later you face a task that is not directly related to Drupal development: managing domains, DNS, SSL certificates, and renewals.

It becomes especially interesting when you are no longer managing 5–10 websites, but dozens or even hundreds.

Drupal Domain Management: How Do You Handle Client Domains?

Imagine a small web agency maintaining 100 client websites:

client-01.com
client-02.com.ua
client-03.com
...
client-100.com

The domains may be registered with different providers:

• NIC.UA
• Cloudflare
• Namecheap
• GoDaddy
• other registrars

DNS may be managed somewhere else, SSL certificates somewhere else again, while domain ownership and expiration dates may be tracked in a CRM, spreadsheet, or simply remembered by someone on the team.

This leads to a practical question:

How do you currently keep track of all these domains?

What I'm interested in

Let's say you manage 50–500 client domains.

How do you handle the following?

1. Where do you keep the list of client domains?
2. How do you track domain expiration dates?
3. Who is responsible for renewals?
4. How does the client pay for a renewal?
5. Do you use automatic renewal?
6. How do you manage domains registered with different registrars?
7. How do you track SSL certificates?
8. Where do you manage DNS?
9. Does the client receive a separate notification before renewal?
10. Have you ever had a domain expire because someone forgot to renew it?

What happens when you have 100+ domains?

Imagine you have 200 client domains.

Every month you need to know:

Which domains are expiring?
Which ones have already been renewed?
Who needs to pay?
Which client owns each domain?
Which registrar is it with?
Where is the DNS managed?
Is the SSL certificate about to expire?

At the same time, the client usually doesn't care which registrar you use.

They simply expect:

"My website works, my domain is renewed, and my SSL certificate is valid."

How do you solve this problem today?

I'm interested in real-world workflows, rather than theoretical solutions.

For example:

Option 1

We keep everything at one registrar.

Option 2

Domains are spread across several registrars and we track everything in Google Sheets.

Option 3

Everything is automated through APIs.

Option 4

An account/project manager handles it.

Option 5

We only have 10–20 websites, so it isn't really a problem yet.

Option 6

We don't manage domains at all — clients register and renew them themselves.

All of these answers are interesting.

What would a useful tool look like?

Imagine a single dashboard for a web agency:

Clients:              74
Domains:             347

Expiring < 30 days:   12
SSL < 30 days:         3
Expired:               1

With something like:

Client
 ├── Website
 ├── Domain
 ├── DNS
 ├── SSL
 ├── Hosting
 └── Billing

The system could automatically notify a client:

Your domain example.com expires in 14 days.

While the agency could see all client domains in one place.

Maybe such a tool is not needed at all — and that's exactly why I want to understand how developers actually solve this problem today before building anything.

A few questions for the community

If you work with client websites, I'd really appreciate your input.

1. Approximately how many client domains do you currently manage?

• Less than 10
• 10–50
• 50–100
• 100–500
• 500+

2. Where are those domains registered?

3. Where do you keep information about them?

4. Who handles renewals?

5. Do you have automated notifications?

6. How much of this work is still manual?

7. Would you find a single dashboard for managing client domains useful?

And the most important question:

If such a tool existed, what would you actually be willing to pay for — number of domains, number of clients, or a fixed monthly subscription?

Real-world examples are especially welcome.

You can reply in the comments, even with a very short answer:

50 domains / NIC.UA + Cloudflare /
Google Sheets / manual renewals /
a unified dashboard would be useful

I'm interested in learning how Drupal developers and web agencies actually manage this today — and whether there is a real problem worth solving.