Doing Whois lookups has been popular since the 70s when Whois was invented. The moment the first domain name was registered, we had to have a record of the owner and other information about that domain name. Doing Whois lookups with an API, now that came a lot later. I don’t want to bore you with history too much, but I thought it should keep in mind how long ago Whois burst on the scene. Now that that’s out of the way, we can get down to the nitty-gritty of a Whois lookup API.
We need Whois lookups. Lots of Whois lookups
Doing ten or twenty whois lookups is easy, and a manual search on the designated registry of any of the 1500 TLDs will do. But what if, for some reason, you need to make bulk whois lookups? Not thousands whois lookups, but millions of whois requests?
That would be kinda hard, if not impossible. With the advent of artificial intelligence and applications before them, we quickly learned that computers are much better than us at doing bulk whois lookups.
It’s the same question that my business partner at the time and I asked ourselves while we were redesigning our website for our web hosting business. We wanted to get more clients for our web hosting business, and we were designing a brand new website.
While we were doing that, obviously, we wanted to build a great domain availability checker. At the time, many domain availability checkers were returning a fair amount of false negatives, saying that the domain name was available for registration when in fact, it was not. Not that Google Registrar didn’t make the same mistake years later by selling google.com.
Building a domain checker? You need Whois Lookup API!
That’s when we had the idea to build an API that allows us to do domain checks with an API. Later domain registrars caught on and realized that domain resellers could use their domain availability APIs in order to do domain lookups and register domain names.
So you don’t really need a Whois lookup API in order to get the information if the domain name is registered or not. You could get along with a domain availability API that gives you one of two responses.
- The domain name is registered, or
- The domain name is not registered.
Depending on how well this Domain Availability API is built, you do have to do a Whois lookup at some point to be 100% sure that the domain name is available. That’s an entirely different topic, so we’ll discuss that on another day.
What is a Whois Lookup API?
I wrote briefly about what is Whois, and what it looks like in a JSON response, and also what Whois looks like in XML since XML was perhaps more popular about a decade ago. These two articles will help you understand the responses after you make a request to a Whois lookup API. Another thing worth having in mind is that Whois lookup API is just a different word for a:
These are all one and the same. You could compare a Whois to a giant database, and an API allows you to look up any domain name in that database.
Operating and using a Whois lookup API is a bit tricky because you need to be a developer. I am writing this article, but I am not an engineer. ChatGPT has helped me write code and build a simple domain checker, which I might address in another article, but for now, suffice it to say to operate an API, you need to know at least some basic JavaScript coding.
Speaking of which, I’ve prepared Whois API code examples in different programming languages for you to explore. These should come in handy if you are making first steps.
Whois Lookup API Code Examples:
How to use a Whois Lookup API
Now that you have the code examples, you know that you need to write code in order to operate a Whois Lookup API. You also know that operating a Whois Lookup API is like operating any other API. So how do you use this API in particular?
Don’t worry. We have a page for that as well – How to use Whois API.
Then again, if you are not sure what the purpose is or why, you should use a Whois API. An article such as this might come in handy. In this article, we list several use cases of how a Whois API can become useful when working in cybersecurity, flipping domain names, catching expired domain names, building a domain checker, and so on.
Easy as 1-2-3 to make your first API request
Let’s summarize your approach to making a very first Whois Lookup API request.
- Figure out why you want to make thousands of whois lookups. What’s the end result? What’s the use case? Are you doing some research? Checking domain age?
- Signup on WhoAPI and get 10,000 API requests for free. And as a side note, remember that our newsletter subscribers get extra 10,000 API requests after 6 months and other perks.
- Make the first test by doing a single whois lookup inside the dashboard. This will help you confirm that your account is active and that we support the TLD you are interested in checking.
- Get the API key you will need to make API requests
- Decide which code you are going to use. PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Objective C, C#(.NET), or Java, and use the code examples we prepared. Or write the code yourself.
- Consult the API documentation if problems arise when making the first API requests with your code.
- Additional option: Contact customer support
You should be making API requests with ease, and then you can work on storing the results.
