Who is That Domain’s Owner? Do They Really Own It?
You may visit a website and wonder who owns the domain name for many reasons. For example, you may want to try to purchase the domain name, or you could simply be curious. Possibly, you suspect the owner information presented on the page is fake, and you would like to cross-reference it with another source. Whatever the reason is, the thing you need to do is a WHOIS search for the domain name.
What is WHOIS?
WHOIS is an old command that would tell you details about a user on a computer system. In its modern usage, it refers to a service that allows you to search for a domain name and see their contact information if the user has not chosen to make it private.
What kind of information will a WHOIS search give me?
There is a surprising amount you can learn about the people behind a domain name. Of course, you can see the domain registrar, its creation date, and its expiration date. What even better is that you can see the name of the registrant along with their street address, phone number, e-mail address, and the domain servers. Also you will find separate information for registrant, administrative and technical contact. There are several websites like DomainTools which provide WHOIS search with some additional data like WHOIS for server the site is hosted on, other domains on that server, ping time, list of other domains owned by registrant and some other info you could find useful while researching.
Private domain registration prevents people from being able to see this information. Some registrants choose to privately register because spammers will collect data from WHOIS searches for their mailing lists. Others will take it even further by using the phone number and street address of registrants to harass them if the content is deemed objectionable. Then again, a few people enter a proxy entity or alias as the registrant, so the information may be of no use.
The purpose of using WHOIS command
Sometimes i'm using whois to find if there is a good domain name which nearly reach the expiry day. If the original registrant forgets to extend the contract of the domain, i'll take it for sure :D.
That's maybe a reason of some people to make their domain is using private-whois.
Whois privacy
How can using whois privacy prevent someone from buying expired domain?
Post new comment