Monthly Archives: January 2013

What is WHOIS?  WHOIS, in a literal sense, is a protocol used to query databases that store registration information relative to Internet resources.  Sounds complicated, but for our purposes at this time, WHOIS is simply a means of finding out who owns a given domain name.  There are countless websites that allow you to run a WHOIS search; any domain registrar, for starters.  You can essentially choose at random from a quick Google search for WHOIS. When you do perform a WHOIS search on a domain, you find all sorts of information about the registrant of the given domain.  In a nutshell, you’ll see all of the publicly available information relative to the given domain.  Here’s the truncated results from a WHOIS search for HostGator.com, which is a perfect example: We see when the domain was created and when the current registration period expires.  We also see the nameservers to which the domain is pointed.  The most important piece though is the name, address and phone number of the registrant.  The information shown here for HostGator.com is essentially all publicly available information already, so it’s really a no harm and no foul situation Continue reading →