Domain WHOIS lookup: who registered it, when it expires, where it points

Type the domain into the box above, with or without www.. Subdomains work too: blog.example.com falls back to example.com for the registry record. You don't need to know the registrar first.

Got a URL? Copy just the host part. An email address? Take everything after the @. For country domains like example.co.uk, example.hr or example.de we route the question to the right national registry on our own.

WHOIS is old. RFC 812 defined it in 1982 for ARPANET: plain text over TCP port 43, and every registry picked its own field names. Parsing it across 1,500+ TLDs is a mess, so in 2015 ICANN started pushing a replacement.

That replacement is RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol). It runs over HTTPS, returns JSON with standard field names, handles international domain names cleanly and lets registrars show more data to verified abuse investigators than to anonymous users. Every gTLD registry has supported it since 2019 and most country registries followed. We ask RDAP first, fall back to WHOIS, and show the merged result.

GDPR and the redacted record

Until May 2018 anyone could read the owner's name, organisation, postal address, phone and email for any gTLD domain. Then GDPR arrived and ICANN made registries redact personal data for European owners. Most registrars simply redacted everyone, because checking "is this person in the EU?" per domain was harder. What stays public today:

• Registrar, technical contact and abuse email
• Country and state of the owner, no street address
• Organisation name, only if the owner ticked the "organisation" box
• Dates and status, which were never redacted

Country registries set their own rules. .de (DENIC) shows almost nothing. .hr (CARNet) and .fr (AFNIC) redact like ICANN does. .ru still shows the company name for business owners.

cars.com was registered in 1995 and reportedly went to Gannett for $872M in 2014. voice.com, also 1995, sold to Block.one for $30M in 2019. cryptocurrency.com, registered in 2018, went for low millions. The earlier the date, the fewer rivals, and a short generic .com from the 1990s simply can't be replaced. New endings like .app, .dev and .ai reset the clock with every release.

For a buyer the record gives three answers at once: how old the domain is, whether it changed hands recently (a big gap between creation and last update), and whether it sits locked at a decent registrar. For past prices, NameBio and published for-sale records fill in the rest.

DNS in 60 seconds

A domain is a readable name for an IP address. When you type example.com, your resolver asks the root servers who runs .com, asks them who serves example.com, then asks those nameservers for the IP. Each answer is cached for the TTL the owner set. The tree goes root, TLD, second level, subdomains. You don't own a domain, you rent it: a yearly fee to the registrar, who pays a smaller one to the registry.

Registry, registrar, registrant

The registry runs the TLD: Verisign for .com and .net, PIR for .org, Identity Digital (formerly Donuts) for hundreds of new gTLDs, CARNet for .hr, DENIC for .de. The registrar is who you pay, like GoDaddy, Namecheap, Tucows or Cloudflare Registrar. The registrant is the legal owner. The registry keeps the master record, the registrar holds the contract, the registrant picks nameservers and contacts, and ICANN writes the rules for all of them.

gTLD vs ccTLD

Generic TLDs are open to anyone. The original seven were .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil and .int, and the 2012 round added hundreds more (.app, .dev, .blog, .shop, .tech). Country-code TLDs follow ISO 3166 codes: .de, .hr, .uk (with the older .co.uk), .co (Colombia, now used worldwide). Each country registry sets its own rules on who can register, prices, transfers and what WHOIS shows. Some want a local presence (.de, .ca), others sell to anyone (.io, .me, .tv, .co).

From registration to drop

You register for 1 to 10 years. After expiry comes about 30 days of grace, where the old owner renews at the normal price. Then about 30 days of redemption, where only the old owner can get it back, usually with a hefty restore fee. Then 5 locked days of pending delete, and the domain drops back into the pool. Backorder services grab good names the second they release. The whole run after expiry is roughly 75 days for most gTLDs.

EPP status flags

EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) is how registrars and registries talk to each other. The flags in WHOIS tell you where a domain stands:

• ok: nothing special, the domain is active
• clientTransferProhibited: locked by the registrar, the normal default
• clientHold: in the zone but not resolving
• serverHold: the same, set by the registry, often a legal action
• autoRenewPeriod: just expired, in the grace window
• redemptionPeriod: still renewable, but expensive
• pendingDelete: drops in 5 days, no renewal possible

Nameservers, glue and DNSSEC

Nameservers answer for the domain, and the parent zone records which ones they are (.com knows example.com uses ns1 and ns2.examplehost.com). If the nameservers live inside the domain itself, like ns1.example.com, the registry publishes glue records with their IPs so resolvers don't go in circles. DNSSEC signs the answers. The public key (DS record) sits at the registry, so a resolver can prove a reply really came from the right nameserver and wasn't changed on the way.

Privacy services

Before GDPR, privacy was a paid add-on, usually $5 to $15 a year: the registrar put its own contact in place of yours and forwarded the mail. Now the same redaction is free and on by default for gTLDs. The catch is you can't just copy an owner's email from WHOIS any more. You use the registrar's relay form instead.

International names and punycode

DNS only takes ASCII. Names like café.com, пример.рф or 例子.中国 are stored in Punycode, so café.com becomes xn--caf-dma.com. Browsers show the Unicode form, while DNS, WHOIS and certificates carry the punycode one. Our lookup takes both and shows both.

The DNS records on the result page

• A and AAAA: the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses the domain points to
• MX: the servers that accept its email
• NS: the nameservers, which should match the registry
• TXT: free text, used for SPF, DKIM and ownership checks
• SOA: the zone's master record with serial number and refresh timers
• CAA: which certificate authorities may issue SSL for the domain

Age, history and value

Older domains tend to carry more SEO weight, because links built up over years count more than fresh ones. A creation date in the 1990s is a hard signal. The last-updated date is softer: it can mean a transfer, a contact change or just a renewal. NameBio collects past sales, which is the most useful input when you value a name. ICANN doesn't set prices, the market does.

Why two WHOIS tools disagree

The truth sits at the registry. A tool asks either the registry (RDAP or WHOIS), the registrar, or a scraper. Registrars can lag the registry by a few minutes, and scrapers cache for hours or days. We ask the registry, so a domain you registered a minute ago shows up here as soon as the registry has it.

Moving a domain to another registrar

Five steps. Unlock it at the current registrar (clear clientTransferProhibited). Ask for the auth code, sometimes called the EPP code. Start the transfer at the new registrar with that code. Approve the confirmation email from the old registrar, or wait 5 days for automatic approval. The registry updates the registrar field and you pay for one extra year, added to your current expiry, so no time is lost. ICANN blocks transfers in the first 60 days after a registration or a previous transfer.