WHOIS lookup

Every domain name has an owner, a company managing it, and a set of dates attached to it — when it was bought, when it needs renewing. A WHOIS lookup is simply how you pull that information up for any domain, the same way you'd check a car's registration to see who it belongs to. Type a domain in above and we query the registry directly to show you its current record.

No. Type "google" and we look up google.com, then show you which domain was checked so you can correct it if you meant something else.

A full record has the registrar, the registration/expiry/last-updated dates, the domain's status codes, its nameservers, DNSSEC status, the registrar's abuse contact, and the registrant's contact details where they haven't been redacted for privacy. This page covers the WHOIS record itself — for the domain's DNS records, TLS certificate, or exact age in days, use the DNS, Certificate and Age tabs above the search box.

A registry is the organization that runs an entire extension — Verisign runs .com, for example. A registrar is the company you actually bought your domain from — Namecheap, GoDaddy, and hundreds of others. Registries don't sell domains directly to the public; they license registrars to do that, and your registrar is who you go to for any changes to your domain, not the registry.

Yes. Looking up a single domain's WHOIS record has always been free and requires no account — this has been public policy since domain registration began. What isn't allowed is harvesting the data in bulk to spam registrants; a one-off check like the one you're running here is exactly what the system is meant for.

Yes. WHOIS and RDAP data is public by ICANN policy, and looking up any domain — yours, a competitor's, one you're thinking of buying — is a normal, legal use of that data. The restrictions apply to automated bulk scraping and using contact details for spam or harassment, not to checking who owns a domain.

WHOIS/RDAP tells you who owns a domain and when it expires. DNS tells you where it currently points — its A, MX and TXT records, the servers that actually route traffic and email for it. A domain can have a perfectly normal WHOIS record while its DNS is misconfigured, or the other way around, so the two checks answer genuinely different questions. Use the DNS tab above for that side of it.

Status codes are locks and flags attached to a domain, and they come in two families. Codes starting with client were set by your registrar, usually at your request or as standard account protection — you can normally remove these yourself from your registrar's control panel. Codes starting with server were set by the registry that runs the extension itself, and you can't remove those — they usually mean a dispute, a legal hold, or registry policy is in effect. A hold code (client or server) is different from a prohibited code: hold means the domain has actually stopped resolving — the site and any email tied to it go down — while prohibited codes just block one specific action, like a transfer or an edit, without affecting whether the domain currently works. See the status code table above for what each specific code means and whether it's routine or worth investigating.

Most registries replace personal contact details with "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY", either because the owner bought WHOIS privacy or because data-protection rules require it for individuals. The registrar's abuse contact is never redacted — ICANN requires it stay public, because it is a corporate address rather than personal data. That is the one to use if you need to report a domain.

It's not automatic — you turn it on through your registrar, not through the registry. Most registrars offer it free or for a small yearly fee alongside your registration; look for "WHOIS privacy," "domain privacy," or "ID protection" in your registrar's dashboard. Once it's on, your details switch to "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY" the next time the record updates.

Your registrar — not the registry — holds the master copy of your contact details, so changes go through them: log in to your registrar account, update your contact details there, and the change publishes to WHOIS/RDAP automatically. Propagation time varies by registry and isn't instant — run a lookup here a day or two after updating to confirm it went through, and check back again if it hasn't yet.

Country-code extensions (ccTLDs) are run by that country's own registry, not by ICANN's general rules, so each one sets its own requirements — some demand a local resident or business entity to register, some redact different fields, some don't support RDAP yet. That's why the same lookup can show noticeably different information depending on whether you're checking a .com or a domain tied to a specific country.

Instead of an empty record, we show that it is available along with what it would cost to register and renew it — including the real renewal price, not just the discounted first year.