The WHOIS Records

Posted: March 26th, 2015

 

A whois (pronounded who is) also known as SWIP (shared whois project) is a common protocol that allows looking up registration information on a domain name or IP address. There are many databases available to make these kinds of lookups nowadays, so you can use many websites that will provide you with the same information on the queried domain. The information gathered by these databases is quite complete, but not everything can be made public.

 

The public information we can see through a whois lookup is:

 

Registrar: The commercial organization that manages the reservation of internet domain names.

 

Registrant: The person or entity that registered the domain name. Also referred to as the domain owner.

 

Contacts: The individual people to reach in regards to the domain name.

 

Name servers: The servers where the domain points to.

 

Domain status: Whether the domain is active, locked, in redemption, etc.

 

Registration date: Date logged where the domain was first registered.

 

Expiry date: Date when registration of the domain will expire.

 

Updated date: Last date of modification on the domain name.

 

Using it

As previously stated, you can use many sites, and to only name a few : domaintools.com, who.is, internic.net, cqcounter.com, etc. You can also go directly on a registry's site to query domains.

 

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