Checking Domain Name’s Availability Using Domain WHOIS

Checking Domain Name’s Availability Using Domain WHOIS

Though domain names are not private properties, still a domain name should be available for registration if you want to acquire it. This simple tutorial is perfect for website developers, who are developing websites for domain name registrars. The basic technique to check whether a domain name is available for registration is very simple. You need to send a WHOIS query to the whois server of the particular TLD, associated with the domain name.

Here we’ll use the example of techbongo.com and anydomain987.com. This domain name techbongo.com is already registered, whereas the domain name, anydomain987.com is available for registration (as of now). The tld here is .com, so we need to send the whois query to one of the whois servers of .com; for example you can use whois.markmonitor.com.

Simply speaking, if the domain name is not registered, whois servers send a string as response. You need to parse the string to conclude the status of the domain. Now, this response string varies from server to server. Some of the example responses are “Domain not found”, “Not Found”, “AVAILABLE”, “Not Registered” etc. Whereas, if the domain name is available for registration, it’ll send the whois information as response. So, if you’re developing custom API for checking domain name’s availability you need a list of whois servers and corresponding response strings for all the TLDs.

You can write a script using PHP or ASP or Perl to send a request to WHOIS server and print the received response of screen. Using the script try to whois some available domains like anydomain987.com to get the pattern of the response string of that whois server. List of whois servers for all the tlds are available on ICANN website. You’ll hardly get a prepared list of whois servers and corresponding response string patterns on the internet. So, you need to do this manually.

There are hundreds of companies in the world who are developing WHOIS API. If you’re planning to start a domain registration company you can hire these companies to integrate domain registration service into your website. Professional WHOIS API developers can develop a domain availability checker scripts easily.

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