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Whois Snoops

With tens of millions of web sites out there now, if you have a new idea for a web site, web service, product or just a company name, one of the first things you do now is to see if an appropriate domain name is free.

With domain squatters and other riff-raff registering practically every conceivable domain name out there, you have be not only creative but be a little careful in how you search for a domain name. There have a been a few instances of domain name "claim jumping" where people have done the usual "whois" query at some registrar site only to come back a short while later (with credit card in hand) to find it (surprise, surprise) registered already. And who registered it? A company linked to the registrar!

So how do you get around this Catch-22?

Well, one way is to just pony up the cash and register anything you even think might be a possibility and then pick from those. But that can get expensive, especially if you don't have a huge bankroll to do that with.

Domain Lookups Without Whois

So there is at least one other way. If you are familiar with the Internet protocol, Domain Name Service (DNS), then it's just a matter of a few commands to see if a domain is free. Although there are probably various freeware tools for domain name lookups, most of them still use the whois protocol, which we've just discussed. The better program to use, in this instance, is nslookup. It's included in every major OS platform (Mac, Windows, UNIX), so you shouldn't need to download anything additional.

To use nslookup, you can simply just type nslookup to use it interactively, or you can add a few options to do the lookup all in one command.

The all-in-one version:

Now if the domain is registered it will have some name servers associated with it and these will be displayed pretty immediately: But if the domain is free, the lookup will probably hang for a few seconds and then return something like: or maybe something like: Using nslookup in interactive mode: Once you've set the query type to "ns" (name server) you can just keep typing in domain names to check them: Lot of people prefer to use the dig command, although that may not always be available: I didn't do an example on Windows, but it's the same syntax there too.

DomainCalc.com

So what does DomainCalc.com have to do with this?

DomainCalc.com is a web app I wrote to do the above, except without all the extra typing. Just punch in the domain names and it'll do the DNS queries for you all in one shot and spit out the results in a nice table (with some snide remarks thrown in for good measure):

If a domain exists, there's links there for you to view the existing site and see the information about the domain, such as the owner and expiration date, and so forth.

The other part of DomainCalc.com, and the reason for the "calc" part of the name, is that once you've found some free domains, sometimes you want to shop around for the best deal. If you already use a specific registrar and always stick with them, then you don't really need this feature. But I occasionally like to shop around, just to see if I can be getting a better deal.

I went to the trouble of grabbing pricing info from a good number of registrars (including most all the popular ones), including multi-domain discounts and multi-year discounts, privacy, etc. All wrapped up in a easy-to-use interface. You can do either price lookups or name lookups or both.

So as you can see above, once you've done your name lookups, if any of the domains are free, then you can just 1-click from that page to the price checks.

I don't have a good way to scrape the pricing data from all the registrars automatically, so potentially the pricing info might get stale. I have a semi-automated way to update it, but the data gathering is still somewhat manual at this point. If you notice the pricing to be out of whack, let me know. Anyway, hope someone else gets some use out of DomainCalc.com. It's saved me quite a lot of time for new domain searches.