WHOIS Lookup
Look up domain registration details and understand WHOIS records.
Domain Age Calculator
How to Read a WHOIS Record
Domain cannot be transferred (registrar lock). Most common status — protects against unauthorized transfers.
Domain cannot be deleted by the registrar. Common protection for important domains.
Domain settings cannot be modified. Prevents unauthorized DNS changes.
Registry-level transfer lock. Used for domains under legal dispute or UDRP proceedings.
Domain is not active in DNS. Often applied for non-payment or legal issues.
Domain was deleted and is in a 30-day grace period before becoming available.
Domain is scheduled for deletion after the redemption period. Will be released soon.
Domain was recently registered and can be deleted with a refund within 5 days.
Domain is active with no pending operations or restrictions.
What Is WHOIS?
WHOIS is a query-and-response protocol used to look up information about registered domain names. Created in the early 1980s, it was originally designed to identify responsible parties for network resources. A WHOIS record contains the domain's registrar, registration and expiry dates, name servers, and historically, the registrant's contact information. WHOIS is maintained by regional internet registries (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, AFRINIC, LACNIC) and domain registrars.
GDPR and WHOIS Privacy
Before GDPR (2018), WHOIS records publicly displayed registrant names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers. GDPR's data protection requirements led ICANN to redact personal information from most WHOIS records. Now, you typically see "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY" or the privacy proxy service's details. This has made legitimate uses of WHOIS (law enforcement, anti-abuse, intellectual property) more challenging while protecting individual privacy.
Domain Status Codes
EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) status codes indicate a domain's current state. "clientTransferProhibited" is the most common — it prevents unauthorized transfers and is applied by default by most registrars. "serverHold" removes the domain from DNS resolution, effectively taking the website offline. Understanding these codes is important when troubleshooting domain issues, transferring domains, or investigating potentially abandoned domains.
WHOIS for Competitive Research
WHOIS data helps researchers understand domain ownership patterns, identify domain portfolios, track registration histories, and perform due diligence before domain purchases. While GDPR has limited contact information visibility, creation dates, registrars, and name servers remain publicly available and provide valuable intelligence about a domain's history, infrastructure, and legitimacy.
WHOIS vs RDAP
RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) is the modern replacement for WHOIS. Unlike WHOIS's unstructured text responses, RDAP returns structured JSON data. RDAP supports authentication (allowing differentiated access levels), internationalization, and standardized error responses. ICANN has mandated RDAP support, and it's gradually replacing WHOIS for domain lookups. Most modern lookup tools use RDAP behind the scenes.