Domain info & WHOIS

What a WHOIS / domain lookup actually tells you

Type a domain into this tool and you get the public registration record behind it: who the registrar is, the key dates, the status flags the registry has set, and the nameservers answering for the name. We pull that data live from the registry over RDAP, then add the domain's A and NS records and an estimated age so you can size things up in one glance. No account, no logging into anyone's portal.

People still call this a "WHOIS lookup" out of habit, and the name's worth keeping because it describes the thing everyone recognizes. Under the hood, though, what you're really querying these days is RDAP.

From WHOIS to RDAP

The original WHOIS protocol dates back to the early internet. You'd open a plain-text connection on port 43, send a domain name, and get back a blob of free-form text. It worked, but it had problems: nothing was encrypted, there was no fixed format, and every registry laid its answer out a little differently, so software had to guess at where the registrar name ended and the dates began.

RDAP — the Registration Data Access Protocol — fixes all of that. It runs over HTTPS, so the query and response are encrypted instead of traveling in the clear. It returns structured JSON, which means a tool can read each field reliably instead of scraping text. And it handles non-Latin scripts properly, so Cyrillic, Chinese, or Arabic domains come back correct. ICANN has been phasing WHOIS out in favor of RDAP for generic TLDs (.com, .net, .org and the rest), and RDAP is now the required standard for them. Many country-code TLDs still run classic WHOIS, so you'll meet both for a while yet.

What each field means

Here's how to read the result.

The registrar is the company the domain was registered through — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and so on. It's not necessarily the owner; it's the seller managing the registration.

The creation date (sometimes labeled registration date) is when the domain was first registered. The expiry date is when the current registration term runs out, and the updated date marks the last time the record changed. These three dates tell most of the story: how old a name is, how soon it lapses, and whether anything moved recently.

The status codes are short flags set by the registrar or registry. The one you'll see most is clientTransferProhibited, which locks the domain against being transferred to another registrar without the owner unlocking it first. It's a security default, not a warning — it doesn't touch DNS, email, or anything operational. Codes like clientHold (the domain isn't resolving) or pendingDelete matter more, so it's worth knowing they exist.

The nameservers are the authoritative servers that answer DNS queries for the domain. They tell you who's actually hosting the zone — often a giveaway for which provider or CDN sits behind a site. If you want to go deeper on what those servers publish, run the name through our DNS lookup, and check where the addresses land with the IP lookup.

Why the owner's name is usually hidden

If you've done a lookup expecting a person's name and email and got "Redacted for Privacy" instead, that's normal now. When GDPR took effect in Europe, ICANN required registrars to stop publishing registrants' personal contact details by default. Plenty of owners also pay for privacy or proxy services on top of that.

So the personal stuff — name, email, postal address — is typically masked. The technical data isn't: registrar, dates, status codes, nameservers, and often the registrant's country still come through fine. If you genuinely need the identity behind a domain (a legal dispute, say), that runs through ICANN's request process rather than a public lookup.

Domain age, and why it's worth checking

The creation date gives you the domain's age, and that number carries more weight than it looks. Google has said age on its own isn't a ranking factor, but the things that come with age usually are: years of backlinks, indexed content, brand searches, and a track record. Studies of top results keep finding that pages ranking at the top tend to be several years old. An aged domain with clean history is a head start; an aged domain with a spammy past can be a liability, which is exactly why you check before you buy.

Day to day, the same lookup covers a lot of ground. Check an expiry date so a domain you care about doesn't quietly lapse. Verify a brand by confirming the registrar and dates line up with what a company claims. And do basic due diligence before buying — a name registered last week and one held steadily for fifteen years are very different purchases, even at the same price.

Frequently asked questions