Whois is a convenient specialized service, thanks to which you can find out basic information about a domain, its owner and registrar company.
What is the WHOIS service
In the beginning, WHOIS was supposed to be just a catalog of contact information of domain system administrators and IP addresses, so that technical specialists could easily find them in case of need. But over time, the list of information has expanded. The WHOIS service adheres to the rules of the international organization ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the corporation on the management of domain names and IP addresses. This shows that the information is collected and stored safely and securely.
To view the available data, you only need to enter the name of the domain you are interested in into the search bar. In case the entered name is already registered, you will see basic information about the domain. If the query shows "is available" - it means that this domain name is currently available for registration.
Basic domain information
WHOIS has access to the databases of all existing domain registrars, that is, here you can find information on all registered domain names. There are many publicly available WHOIS services. Depending on the domain zone output data on a particular domain may be slightly different. But the basic information is always present. It includes such items as:
- domain - actual domain name
- dom-public - information on which category the domain belongs to (YES - public, NO - private)
- mnt-by - this field specifies the identifier of the registrar servicing this domain
- NS (name server) - a list of server names that the domain uses and that keep the domain up and running (in other words, the hosting on which the domain name is located)
- IP - IP address where the domain is located
- status - domain state at the moment of the current request
- created - domain creation date
- modified - date of last changes made to the current domain
- expires - the date of domain registration expiration in the Registry.
Registrar's record
The information block "Registrar's Record" displays basic information about the Registrar:
- registrar - identifier of the registrar where the current domain is maintained
- organization - its name (in English) and organization-loc (name in Ukrainian or russian)
- city, country - the city and country where the registrar is located
- url - official website of the registrar organization
- abuse-email, abuse-phone, abuse-postal - contacts for domain name complaints
Domain owner's details
The Registrant record (information about the registrant's contacts, i.e., the domain owner) contains the following fields:
- person or organization - full name of individual or organization in whose name the domain name is registered
- e-mail, address, phone, postal-code, country - contact details of the registrant
- created - contact creation date
You may find that the owner's data fields contain "not published". This record is displayed if the registrant used the privacy policy and decided to hide his/her personal information from public access.
For most domains, the owner can independently choose which of his private data will be published in the public domain when requested via WHOIS service, and which should be hidden. This is how the "Whois protection" service works. However, it is not available in all domain zones. If this point is important to you, check its availability with the registrar of a particular domain zone.
