What is domain WHOIS information

Domain WHOIS information contains all contact information associated with the domain name. Typically, each Whois record will contain information such as the following:

1. Name and contact information of the Registrant (the person who register/ own the domain),
2. Name and contact information of the Registrar (the organisation or commercial entity that registered the domain name),
3. Registration dates,
4. Name server where the domain name is hosted,
5. Date of most recent update
6. Expiration date.

Apart from the above, sometime it also contains administrative and technical contacts for the domain. Each domain registered, need to maintain WHOIS information.

Effective 1 January 2014, ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) requires every Registrar to verify the email address of the Registrant contact for each gTLD domain name within 15 days of:

• • domain name being registered with unverified Registrant Contact email address (i.e. new email address),
  • domain name being transferred in from another Registrar,
  • the Registrant Contact being replaced by a Contact with an unverified email address,
  • the email address of the Registrant Contact being modified to an unverified email address.

Failure to comply to this requirement, your domain name will be deregister from ICANN database. Hence it is very important to reply to this automated email sent by the Registrar upon registering your domain name. Kindly note that, this is only applicable to gTLD managed by ICANN. It does not apply to ccTLD as the database is maintain by the respective country domain registry.

If you want to find information about a particular domain name, you can use many online tools such as whois.com or ICANN lookup to look for domain WHOIS information.

While the information above is helpful and provide the information about the domain, its ownership and administrative details, it also be the source of email/ identity spamming. This is one of the reason why Registrar offers Domain Privacy Protection to mask your contact information from the public eyes.