WHOIS

WHOIS is the public lookup system that returns ownership and registration details for an internet domain: the registrant, the registrar, the registration and expiry dates, the name servers, and historically a contact email. The protocol dates back to the early ARPANET and remains the standard way to ask who owns a domain. Modern privacy rules (GDPR, ICANN policy) have redacted most personal data from public WHOIS, so individual registrant names and emails are usually replaced with a privacy-proxy contact. Registrars (Namecheap, Cloudflare, Porkbun, Gandi) handle WHOIS records on registrants' behalf.

How it works

WHOIS queries go to the registry responsible for the TLD (Verisign for .com, ICANN-accredited registries for others) and return a text record. Modern alternatives (RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol) provide structured JSON output and better privacy handling.

Why it matters

WHOIS is the canonical record of who controls a domain and when it expires. Letting a domain expire because the WHOIS contact email was outdated is the classic loss-of-website disaster. Keeping WHOIS contact data current matters; using a privacy-proxy service is fine and now common.

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Frequently Asked Questions