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Most importantly, Whois lets you quickly and freely find out whether a domain name is available. If no information about a domain name appears in the Whois database and it doesn’t show up in the lookup results, that means the domain is available and, in most cases, can be registered.
However, Whois is used not only to check domain availability — since that can also be done when choosing a name in a specific domain zone. The main value of the Whois service lies in the fact that it provides complete information about a domain and often allows you to view its history and ownership details.
The Whois service allows you to gather detailed information about a website based on its domain name: you can check the domain’s age, the expiration date of its registration, the current DNS servers, the registrar’s name, and the domain owner.
Below, we’ll go over what kinds of data you can access after running a domain check through the Whois service.
Sometimes users want to know who owns a particular website — for example, to contact the administrator about advertising opportunities. However, it’s not always possible to identify a domain owner through the Whois service, as personal data is often protected by registrars or hidden in accordance with registry privacy rules.
For domains in the .ru, .su, and .рф zones, the administrator’s name is listed in the «person» field if the domain belongs to an individual. If the owner is an organization, its name can be found in the «org» field. If you don’t know who the domain is registered to, the Whois service usually offers a feedback form that allows you to contact the domain owner indirectly, without revealing their personal details.
In Whois, you can determine a website’s approximate age by checking the domain registration date, which is shown in the «created» field. Although the registration date doesn’t always match the actual time when the website was launched, it provides a useful reference point for estimating when the site first appeared.
Another important field is «paid-till», which indicates the date until which the domain has been renewed. This date effectively represents the domain’s expiration date or the end of its current registration period.
Checking a domain’s age and registration history is important not only when purchasing a domain name. Such information is also valuable in business transactions, when selecting partners, or when analyzing online sources. Scammers often create short-lived «one-day» websites offering unrealistically attractive deals. Therefore, it’s wise to verify a website before making any purchases — a recently registered domain can be a strong reason to doubt the legitimacy of its owners or the authenticity of their offers.
Using the Whois service, you can find information about the domain registrar — the company that registered the domain. This information is displayed in the «registrar» field. Details about the registrar can sometimes be required for legal purposes, such as when a domain dispute arises.
You can determine where a website is hosted by checking the «nserver» field in the Whois record, which lists the DNS servers that support the domain.For example, the DNS servers for the domain nic.ru are listed as: ns5.nic.ru, ns6.nic.ru, and ns9.nic.ru. This means the website is hosted by Rucenter’s hosting service.
However, this is a simple but not always reliable way to identify a website’s hosting provider. Sometimes, domain owners delegate their domains to free DNS servers, while the actual website data is stored with a different hosting provider.
As mentioned above, you can view the list of DNS servers associated with a domain through the Whois service. The process is the same as when identifying the hosting provider: Enter the domain name into the Whois search field. After receiving the results, locate the «nserver» field. This field contains the current DNS servers that the domain uses.
Descriptions of fields for international and foreign country-code domains are provided in the Help section of the Whois service.