Whois Lookup API and Bulk Whois Lookup: Deciphering The Concepts

Doing Whois lookups has been a favorite of users since the 70s when Whois was invented. Once the first domain name was registered, there was a norm to keep a record of the owner and additional information on that domain name. Doing Whois lookups with an API was a system that was developed quite later. The history of Whois lookups would bore you, but it is for your knowledge to know how long ago Whois appeared on the scene. That being said, let’s now get down to the nitty-gritty of API Whois lookup.

Users Need Millions Of Whois Lookups.

Doing more than a dozen whois lookups is easy, and a manual search is fine. But let’s say, for some reason, you want to do bulk whois lookups? Like millions of requests? That would be sort of impossible. With the emergence of AI (artificial intelligence) and apps, users quickly understood that computers can do a much better job than us when it came to heavy lifting.

Let’s explain it with an example. ‘’It’s the same question that a business partner would have asked the other while the two were redesigning a website for their web hosting enterprise. Their goal was getting more clients for their web hosting business, and for that they had to design a brand-new website.’’

While they were at it, obviously, they felt the need to build-up a versatile domain availability checker. In that era, most of the domain availability checkers were returning a lot of false negatives, stating that the domain name is available for registration when in truth, it was not.

That’s when the business partners struck with an idea to build an API that enabled users to do domain checks with an API. Afterwards domain registrars saw daylight as they realized that domain resellers may use their domain availability APIs, to do domain lookups and register domain names. Simply put, you don’t actually need a Whois API lookup in order to get the information whether the domain name is registered or not. You will be fine with a domain availability API that gives the standard responses such as:

• The domain name is registered, or
• The domain name is not registered.

Depending on the quality of the Domain Availability API, you will need to do a Whois lookup at some point to assure that the domain name is available.

Deciphering Whois Lookup API.

One thing worth keeping in mind is that Whois lookup API is just another name for a:

• Whois API
• JSON Whois API
• Bulk Whois API
• Whois XML API

Each one is no different than the other. You may compare a Whois to a large database, and an API lets you look up any domain name in that database.

Using Whois Lookup API.

You should know that you must write code if you want to operate a Whois API. You should also know there is no difference between operating a Whois API and any other API. Having said that - how do you use this specific API?

Let’s summarize how you should approach when making your very first Whois Lookup API request.

• Find out why you need to make thousands of whois lookups. What will be the final result? What is the use case? Have you done the research? Did you check the domain age?
• Perform the first test by conducting a single whois lookup inside the dashboard. This will allow you to verify that your account is active and that the provider supports the TLD, you are interested in checking.
• Get the API key you will require for making API requests.
• Choose the code you will be using. PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Objective C, C#(.NET), or Java. Then write the code.
• Refer to the API documentation if problems arise while making the first API requests with the code you wrote.

Bulk Whois Lookup.

Bulk WHOIS searches are done to query the WHOIS database for information on many domain names all at one time. This is very useful for different purposes, like:

Cybersecurity: Spotting malicious domains or sniffing out the source of cyber threats.

Brand Protection: Tracking domain registrations to stop brand abuse, like domain squatting.

Market Research: Collecting data on competitors’ domains alongside their online visibility.

Many tools are available for undertaking bulk whois api searches. These tools let the users key in an inventory of domain names and retrieve the related WHOIS data in a format of their choice. A few common Bulk WHOIS tools are:

Free online tools: There are free tools that let users perform bulk whois searches, but they rarely work or provide limited TLD support.

Paid products: Paid products do a good job, but are expensive for amateurs, or startups.

Software: There are traditional solutions that you need to install on your Widows or Mac OS.

The Bottomline

Developers frequently need programmatic access to WHOIS data for integration into their apps. To do this WHOIS providers offer APIs that let developers automate the retrieval of WHOIS data in real-time.