WHOIS is a type of query anyone can run on the Web to collect some useful information from a domain name.
DISCLAIMER
There are some domains (i.e.: .mil, .gov, .gob, etc.) that have been pulled from public view completely due to national security matters.
Even though one of the greatest Internet’s appeals is the lack of centralized control it has, there are still many of its underlying functions that ought to be centrally managed in some way in order to ensure or guarantee a good interoperability and prevent sever communication conflicts across the all the geographical boundaries.
So who’s in charge of all this? Well, long story short… A nonprofit organization known as the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Basically they coordinate: Internet Domain Names (like www.nytimes.com or www.youtube.com), IP address numbers, Protocol parameters and numbers for communication ports. They actually do more technical stuff (boring, I know) but let’s just stick with that.
The 3 Rs for domain lookup: Registry, Registrar and Registrant
This is how you can easily collect some useful information from a domain name / TLD (Top Level Domain) by performing a brief WHOIS research on the Web.
Grab a target. Let’s use www.sopitas.com
- Find out who the authoritative registry is
Since this is a .com website (.com is the TLD), we need to look up for the authoritative registry for all of .com.
So dive into www.iana.org/whois and type in.com.
- Find out the Registrar
Once we found out who the registrar for the .com is (in this case,
verisign-grs); let’s head off to their WHOIS Lookup website. To do this, searchwhois verisign-grs.comin Google and click on the very first result.
You’ll land into webwhois.verisign.com and all you have to do is, once again, type in the domain name: - Find out who the Registrant for www.sopitas.com is
The results show that the Registrant is Network Solutions, LLC (and the WHOIS server is whois.networksolutions.com). Again, search in Google for
whois networksolutions.com, make sure you land into their webpage and type insopitas.com. - There you go! You’ll see the information about the registree
If the registree has Domain Name Privacy Protection, their information will not be disclosed and thus replaced by the registrant’s. Otherwise, you’ll be able to see their full contact details.
