by Melanie Denyer

Created on: February 23, 2008   Last Updated: November 14, 2011

A whois lookup, as the name suggests, is a simple way of finding out information about the registration of a web address or Universal Resource Locator (URL): who is [insert name here].com/.org, etc?

There are many reasons for running a whois lookup. You may have wished to register a domain for your business only to discover it was unavailable, but no site existed, in which case you may want to see if it was for sale by its current owner. You may want to contact the owner of a web site for business reasons you don't want to entrust to the contact form on the web site - after all, who knows who reads those? It may even be that you feel you've been defrauded by an e-commerce site and want to know more about the legal entity behind it in order to seek redress.

The information provided by a whois lookup is the information on the domain registration For Administrative Contact :

This is the person or company who should be contacted for administrative issues - this is not necessarily the domain's owner, but will be the person or company who manages the technical admin side of the domain. This may not seem exceptionally useful but if, for example, you wanted to buy the domain, or if you wanted to have some defamatory content removed from the site, this would be a good place to start. The person's contact details may include a physical address, email address and even telephone and fax numbers.

Technical Contact :

The technical contact will be Registrar, the organisation who registered the domain on the owner's behalf. You might want to know this if, for example, the domain has expired and you're looking to register it once it becomes available again: most companies offering domain registration services have a limbo period of a few weeks after expiry in which the customer can pay to renew the registration before it reverts back to the general pool of available names. By contacting the company and asking to be notified once it's available, you may be able to get register the name before anyone else.

Record expires on:

The date on which the current registration expires - if the date is fast approaching and there is no web site there, this may be a sign that you may be able to buy the domain.

Record created on:

This shows you how long the current registrant has owned the domain. This may not seem particularly useful, but if you prefer to check out your e-commerce sites before you do business with them, someone who's owned their domain for a number of years may be more

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