Wouldn’t it be nice to know who owns a particular website? I previously wrote about how to find out who hosts a website, but that only says where the server is located. If you want to verify the owner of a domain name or find out when it expires (so you can purchase it), you should do a WHOIS search.
If you search for WHOIS on Google, you will get several results, but usually whois.net is the first one. By visiting www.whois.net, you can not only find out who owns a particular domain name, but also find out when it was purchased and, more importantly, it will expire.
Finding a domain name at www.whois.net is easy. All you have to do is enter the web address you want to find and all the information you need will appear right away. For example, if you look at the WHOIS website address, you will find important information. In the screenshot below, we can tell that the domain name was purchased in 1997 and they paid for it before 2018 (so no luck trying to redeem it from them anytime soon!).
While WHOIS is a great reference when you want to find information about someone else’s website, it can be a problem when the opposite is true. When buying a domain, or even after, most companies grant the privilege of private registration, which removes any personally identifiable information about the owner.
I recently ran an experiment in which I purchased two new domain names and configured email accounts for each domain name using the info@domainname.com format. Then I allowed my personal information to be displayed on www.whois.net for one of the sites and bought a security feature for the other site. (Note: The security feature displays third-party content instead of yours, as shown below for proxy domains.)
The first site on which all my information was published began to receive spam within 1 week after the information was published. Then, even when I deleted the information a couple of weeks later by purchasing the privacy package, I still continued to receive spam to the original email address.
However, the second site did not receive any spam to its email address. While this may be a coincidence, I highly recommend using the privacy feature whenever you register a new domain name to reduce the risk of getting a mailbox full of spam. Plus, it just keeps your personal information private, which is better since everyone and everything is hacked these days.
Another site that I really like is DomainTools WHOIS Search. When you do a WHOIS search, you get a lot more information than WHOIS.NET.
In addition to the usual information, you get some additional data such as server type, SEO score, HTTP response code, hosting history, registrar history, IP history, and more. All story elements require you to pay a subscription fee, but even without paying, you will get a lot of information about the domain. Enjoy!
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