WHOIS · every ending

Ask the registry.
Then read all of it.

Any name on any ending, put to its own registry — over RDAP where the ending has it and port-43 WHOIS where it does not — with its DNS, mail and network read alongside. The whole answer is set out below, parsed, dated and explained, with the raw text kept so the parsing can be checked.

DC‑W1 WHOIS receiver

RDAP · WHOIS · DNS

Paste anything with a name in it — https://www.bbc.co.uk/news, ops@nic.io — and the registrable domain is found.

Mode

Instrument

Try

What a report holds

Twelve panels, in this order, for every name that turns out to be registered. A name nobody has registered gets a different page: where to check it, and the ending's own facts.

Registration

Created, updated, expires; its age, the days left, and the whole lifecycle drawn to scale.

Registrar

Who sold it, their IANA number, their servers, and where abuse is reported.

Status

Every EPP code as a lit key, what each one stops, and whether the name is registry-locked.

Nameservers

The delegation, who runs it, the glue addresses, and whether DNS agrees with the registry.

Mail & security

Who takes the mail, and how SPF, DMARC, MTA-STS, TLS-RPT and DNSSEC defend it — graded.

Where it lives

Each address traced to its network: AS number, operator, prefix, country, registry.

Contacts

Registrant, admin, tech, billing and abuse, with redaction and privacy services flagged.

DNS

A, AAAA, CNAME, NS, MX, TXT, CAA, SOA, HTTPS, DS and DNSKEY, every row copyable.

The ending

What kind of TLD it is, who runs it, its servers and its IANA record.

Sources

Every server asked, in what role, how long it took, and what it said back.

Every field

Each line the registry and registrar published, in order, with a filter.

Raw

The untouched RDAP JSON and WHOIS text, registry, registrar and IANA.

Batch — paste, drop, or choose a file

Names, or any text with names in it

Choose file

Text, CSV, TSV, JSON, Markdown, HTML, logs or XML, up to 5 MB. The file never leaves this browser; only the names found in it are sent, one at a time.

What the parser found

Nothing yet. Names appear here as you type — de-duplicated, reduced to the registrable domain, with anything that is not a domain set aside and the reason given.

Keep subdomains

Depth

At once

Up to 1,000 names a run. Ctrl+Enter runs, Esc stops.

Results

Batch results. Choose a name to open its full report.

Reading a WHOIS

What a WHOIS tells you — and what it cannot.

A registration record is a small, dry document with a great deal riding on it: who can move the name, who can delete it, when it lapses, and what happens after that. Here is how to read one, and how this page gets it.

01Two protocols for one question

WHOIS is older than the web. The protocol that still answers on TCP port 43 was written down in 1982 as NICNAME/WHOIS (RFC 812) and last revised in 2004 (RFC 3912), and in all that time it has specified almost nothing: open a connection, send one line, read text until the server hangs up. There is no schema, no declared character set, no error code, and no agreement about what anything is called. Registry Expiry Date:, expire:, paid-till: and Expiration date.....: are the same fact from four registries.

RDAP — the Registration Data Access Protocol, RFCs 7480 to 7484 in 2015, revised as RFC 9082 and 9083 in 2021 — is the replacement: HTTPS and JSON, named fields, real status codes, one date format, and links from a registry's record to the registrar's. Every ICANN-contracted registry and registrar has had to run it since 2019, and since 28 January 2025 they have been allowed to switch port 43 off. Many country-code registries have not adopted it, and some never will.

This page asks both. RDAP gives the structured answer; the port-43 text is kept beside it, because for many country codes it is the only thing published, and because some facts — a registrar's reseller, a registry's own remarks — only ever appear in the prose.

02Thick and thin

A thick registry holds the whole record: the name, its dates and status, and the contacts. A thin one holds only what it needs to run the zone — the registrar, the nameservers, the status codes and the dates — and points at the registrar for everything else. Verisign's .com and .net are the thin registries everybody meets: their record ends with a Registrar WHOIS Server: line and an RDAP link to the registrar's own server, and a full answer takes two questions.

The engine follows that referral once, on full reports, and merges the two answers field by field — the registry first for dates and status, because it is the authority on them, and contacts from whichever side published them. Both raw answers are kept in the Raw panel, so where the two disagree the disagreement can be read.

03Why country codes differ

The generic endings — more than a thousand of them — are run under contract with ICANN, and the contract says what must be published and how. The country codes, some three hundred, are not: each runs under its own national rules, so the answer to "what does the record say" ranges from everything to almost nothing. DENIC's .de publishes the nameservers, a status and the date the record last changed — no creation date, no expiry, no registrar. JPRS answers .jp in Japanese unless the query ends in /e. Some registries run no public port-43 service at all, and some answer only a list of approved addresses.

This page still gets an answer out of them. RDAP where IANA's bootstrap lists a server; port 43 by the referral IANA publishes for the ending, in the query dialect each registry expects; and DNS as the corroborating signal, because a name with nameservers in its parent zone is registered whatever its registry says in public. The reverse does not hold — a registered name can sit undelegated — which is why a name with no record and no nameservers comes back Probably unregistered, in amber, and never as a green yes.

04Redacted, and why

Since May 2018 most records have had holes in them. The EU's General Data Protection Regulation made a registrant's name, address, phone number and email personal data; ICANN's Temporary Specification that month let registrars withhold them, and the Registration Data Policy that replaced it in 2025 made withholding the norm. What usually remains public is the organisation, if there is one, the state or province and the country — plus a web form or an anonymised address for reaching whoever holds the name.

Redaction and privacy are different things, and the Contacts panel flags them separately. Redaction is the registrar declining to publish: the fields read REDACTED FOR PRIVACY or are simply absent. A privacy or proxy service is a company that puts its own details in the owner's place — Domains By Proxy, Withheld for Privacy, Contact Privacy Inc. — so the record is complete, it just is not about the owner. Either way, this page does not guess a name the record does not give.

05The status codes

The camel-case words in a record are EPP status codes, from the Extensible Provisioning Protocol that registries and registrars use to talk to each other (RFC 5731, with the grace-period codes in RFC 3915). They come in two families. client… codes are set by the registrar, usually at the owner's request; server… codes are set by the registry and outrank them. A prohibition blocks one operation — delete, transfer, update or renew — and a hold takes the name out of the DNS altogether, which is the one status that makes a registered name stop working.

Code	Set by	What it means
`ok`	registry	Nothing pending, nothing prohibited — the ordinary state of a name nobody has locked.
`clientTransferProhibited`	registrar	Cannot move to another registrar until the lock is lifted. The default at most registrars, and a good sign.
`clientDeleteProhibited`	registrar	Cannot be deleted until the registrar lifts it.
`clientUpdateProhibited`	registrar	Nameservers and contacts cannot be changed until the registrar lifts it.
`server…Prohibited`	registry	The same three blocks, held by the registry. All three together are a registry lock: a change needs out-of-band verification with the registry.
`clientHold` / `serverHold`	either	Withdrawn from the DNS: the name does not resolve. Usually unpaid, disputed, or an abuse action.
`addPeriod`	registry	The first five days after registration; a deletion now is refunded.
`autoRenewPeriod`	registry	Up to 45 days after expiry, when the registry has renewed and the registrar may still reverse it.
`redemptionPeriod`	registry	Deleted, but restorable by the old owner for 30 days, at a fee.
`pendingDelete`	registry	Five days from release. Nothing can stop it now.
`pendingTransfer`	registry	A transfer is under way; the losing registrar has five days to object.

A registry lock is the strongest protection a name can have against hijacking, because no credential at the registrar is enough to undo it. The Status panel lights one key per code present, lists what each one prevents, and says plainly whether the name is registry-locked and whether it can be transferred today.

06After the expiry date

For a generic ending, the expiry date is the start of a sequence rather than the end of the name. The registry usually renews it automatically and bills the registrar, which then has up to 45 days — the auto-renew grace period — to settle whether the owner is paying; ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy guarantees the owner a window to renew in that time. If the registrar deletes it instead, the name enters a 30-day redemption period, restorable only by the old owner and only at a fee, then five days of pending delete, after which it is released and anyone may register it — often within seconds, by the drop-catching services that wait for exactly that moment.

Stage	When	Who can act
Expiry	day 0	The owner renews at the ordinary price.
Auto-renew grace	up to 45 days	The owner, through the registrar; what it costs varies by registrar.
Redemption	30 days	The old owner only, with a restore fee.
Pending delete	5 days	Nobody.
Released	after that	Anyone.

The Registration panel computes those dates from the expiry for generic endings. Country codes set their own rules — some delete on the day, some hold a name for months — so for them the page shows the expiry and says the grace is unknown, rather than borrowing the generic schedule and presenting it as fact.

07How this engine works

Your input is normalised: scheme, path, port and login stripped, an email reduced to its domain, an internationalised name converted to its ASCII form under UTS #46.
The Public Suffix List decides the registrable domain, so www.bbc.co.uk becomes bbc.co.uk and not co.uk.
IANA's RDAP bootstrap names the registry's RDAP server, and IANA's own WHOIS names the port-43 server and describes the ending. Both are cached.
The registry is asked directly — no third-party redirector, no scraped web form — and, for a thin registry, the registrar once.
DNS is read over DNS-over-HTTPS from Google's resolver, with Cloudflare's as the fallback: A, AAAA, NS, MX, TXT, SOA, CAA, DS, DNSKEY, HTTPS and the mail-policy records.
Up to three addresses are traced to their networks: AS number and operator from Team Cymru, the network's name and owner from its regional internet registry.
Everything is parsed into one record, and every raw answer is kept beside it.

Answers are cached — a full report for an hour, a batch reading for six — and each address is limited to twelve full reports and forty batch readings a minute, which keeps the registries willing to answer. If the engine itself cannot be reached, the page asks RDAP and DNS from your browser instead and says so at the top of the report. No affiliate links, no account, and nothing you look up is sold or kept beyond the cache and your own browser's history.

What it will never claim

Four answers this page refuses to give.

A failure is not a yes.

A timeout, a refused connection, a registry having a bad afternoon: each comes back Unknown, in amber, with a way to ask again. None of them ever comes back Available, because the answer you want to hear is the one that has to be hardest to produce.

Silence is not free.

A name with no public record and no nameservers is reported Probably unregistered — amber, never green — because a registered name parked without a delegation looks exactly the same from here. And a registry’s own “no record” is not a price tag either: registries hold names back — reserved, blocked for brand owners, premium — and those answer the same way, so the most this page will say is Not registered, and a registrar’s search has the last word.

It will not invent a date.

If a registry publishes no creation date, the report says "not published" rather than filling the gap. Grace and redemption dates are computed only for generic endings, where the schedule is written into the contract.

It will not name an owner the record does not.

A redacted field stays redacted. No enrichment, no guesswork from other sources, no "probable owner": the report says what the registry and the registrar published, and who they are.

Ask the registry.Then read all of it.