When you register in a domain, you must provide some of your personal information. Based on your requirement, you can make your information private or public. When you make it public, anyone can view your details and contact you, which are best for organizations. If you don’t hide it, the public can view all your information with several availabilities of tools. But some people don’t know how to check a domain name’s contact information online. If you are one among them, the following information will be very helpful for you. Check out where you can get a domain name’s contact information by yourself.
Where can you check the domain information?
If you are looking to get the domain name’s contact information, then Whois is the ideal option for almost everyone. It is one of the widely used Internet record listings that find who owns a domain and how to contact the individual. Whois allows you to get the name and other information of the owners of a domain, and also it is one of the oldest internet tools to verify identities. It has a proven record and has developed into an important resource for maintaining the integrity of the domain name registration and website ownership process.
It is a very simple process of finding the domain name contact information on the Whois tool. To get your required information, all you need is to type the domain name in question into the search bar above. This Whois tool allows you to learn the registrant information and the nameservers and associated IP addresses. With this tool, individuals can suppress domain names for various reasons like expiration dates, and when transferring ownership and checking criminal activities, authorities can check domain names.
What is in a Whois record?
The whois tool helps you find the details of the domain owner’s information. This tool contains all the contact information associated with the person, group, or company registering a particular domain name. It will contain some details like the name and contact information of the registrar, the registration dates and the expiration date and a lot more. It also offers the administrative and technical contact information of the registrant.
Accuracy of Whois information
Whois contains information that is initially offered by the domain owners when they register the domain name. But over time, some information might get changed, and the details already contained in the record may get out of date. Whois detail is managed within the domain dashboard, and the domain owners have various procedures for changing the details that appear on a Whois record. Some general pieces of information like accessing account information through the registrar’s website or a call centre representative. It has an accurate date, making it easier to connect with a registrant or administrator.
Who uses a whois domain name lookup?
Generally, the whois tool is used by several third parties to check domain names in the whois search database. Since the tool contains various information about the domain owners, this tool is used by several third parties for various reasons like getting connected to develop business, for marketing purposes and many other reasons. Here are some scenarios of using the whois tool.
- When a person needs to check domain names for expiration dates
- Registrars will check domain names in the ownership transferring process.
- During the investigation of criminal activity, the authorities will check domain names.
You can make your information public and remember that the publically available information might enhance your risk of becoming a victim of hackers, spammers and data miners. So before making your information public, make sure to think about its positive and negative effects. If you don’t want to take a risk, then obviously, you can hide your information if required.
How to find a domain name owner
If you are looking to find any domain name owners, you can follow the below-mentioned steps.
Visit the website
The first step that you have to do to know the domain name owners is to visit their domain. By visiting the website, you can get to know if someone is hosting a website with it or not and even find contact details on the landing page. But in some cases, you will also land on a page with no information at all, but it is worth checking. You can also check public archives to see if the domain has ever hosted a website before.
Check whether the information is listed in the Whois directory
As you all know that all domain name registrations are regulated by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN requires a registrant, administrator and technical contact for every domain name. Every registrant must offer a name, mailing address, phone number, and email address to get registered. All the information they offer will be stored in the Whois directory initially and made it available to the public.
But if owners don’t prefer to share their personal information publically, they can keep their information private, including network solution customers who opt for perfect privacy. It is the service that replaces registration contact information with that of the registrar’s or the registrar’s private registration service provider. But when privacy is enabled, you can use the details listed in Whois to contact the domain owners. Checking on Whois will help you to assess how likely a domain name is to become available.
Contact the domain registrar
If you don’t get the information on the above-mentioned points, you can contact the registrar with which the domain name is registered. Whois offers information about where a domain name is registered, but if the privacy is enabled, you can make use of details included in the directory listing or look up the information on their website.
Summing it up
As you have seen above, Whois is one of the widely used tools to get to know about the domain name’s contact information. Other than Whois, various other tools are also available out there, so before you use it, ensure its effectiveness and your requirement to select the best tool.