My website seems to have a squatter

Frank, get on to them pronto. Whois says you still own it, but should you leave it too long, domain hijackers will buy it as soon as it comes available. From my memory you get about a months grace before they release the domain for sale. However, and I don't want to scare you, but a few years ago, i let a domain expire , the registrar wanted big money to re-activate. Something like 200quid if I remember right.

BTW guys, I know metcheck are doing a big server upgrade this weekend, i'd say thats why its currently pointing at a holding page. In fact I just checked and metcheck.com doesn't expire until 2017! So it is just down to their upgrade.

Frank,

I would like to echo Dave's comments as well. There are people who specifically pursue such expirations so that they can blackmail you later when you want to reactivate your domain.

We in Greece are fortunate in that we can renew for two years and, as such, the problem of expired domains is not as frequent (assuming one lets it get to that stage).

Thanks for the advice lads.
Turns out I used an old email address when I bought the domain so
the warnings that it was about to expire did not reach me.
Looks like Register 365 have locked the domain so I will renew it on Monday.
I encountered a similar problem last year updating the clubs site except
it was the host that wanted to charge a full years fee just so I could transfer it.
Needless to say we just changed the domain name.