There is always a risk of loosing an asset, that includes hijacking. However to reduce forgeting of renewal there is the recipe I have once read here on HN:

Renew your doman for 10 years now, and then every next year do 1 year renewal. If you forget it then you still have 9 years of buffer.

If your domain name provider is serious, almost none: there's a transition period (a few weeks) between the expiration date of your domain and when somebody else can buy it again. So if you forget to renew it, your emails stop working and you'll renew it really quickly ;).

Source: it happened to me last month (the provider being OVH).

You'd probably have to really work at it.

Most registrars are going to send you multiple emails leading up to the expiration, when it expires, and after it expires reminding you it expired. You'd have to miss a lot of emails.

And once it has expired, you have (depending on the TLD) over a month of grace period where it's not available for general registration where you can still renew it. You'd have to miss the fact that all of your services were offline for over a month.

I only work with a company who’s team I can actually call. i pay a bit more, but that direct access is great.

It’s actually hard to lose a domain if you have a good registrar. There is 90 day quarantine period even if you cross the renewal treshold. You can also domain lock, which means you need to manually unlock a domain before moving.

I've used auto-renew ... but it turned out my biggest risk was actually the expiration data on my credit cards

I loaded up credits at my registrar to last a couple years because of this.

That's we something like PayPal is nice, your cards can expire and be replaced without interruption to automatic payments. And like the email problem, you don't have to go around changing it every couple of years.

I have all my domains on autorenew, probably many I should have let lapse now, and some of which I have regretted letting go of.

I feel your pain.. I accidentally let my main blog domain go a long while ago when I decided to drop most of the domains I was holding.

Beyond this, I've had a few pretty good ones over the years... right now, I've got about 30 of them, and just keep thinking I should let most of them go.

I would assume most domain registrars send you reminder emails as your expiration gets closer.

If a domain is important to you, you should have it set to autorenew.

Some registrars let you enable automatic renewal, so in that case the only risk is to keep paying for a domain that you forgot of.

How is credit card expiration handled? Or do you suggest another payment method?

I think they sent me a notification about the expiring card once.

Another alternative is using one that accept recurring payments through PayPal; that way you would have to handle card expiration only with Paypal.