Domain Guide

Every line of a whois output tells a story. These guides explain what the tool's data actually means and what to do about it — and each page ends with a live lookup of your own domain.

Whois: the public record of a domain name

What a whois query shows, where the data comes from, and the registry vs registrar distinction. How domain lookup works and how to read the output correctly.

Why the owner's name is missing from whois output

REDACTED FOR PRIVACY, Data Protected, Hidden upon user request… Why whois privacy exists (GDPR), what proxy services do, and how to reach an owner anyway.

The afterlife of an expired domain: how many days you really have

Does a site die the moment its domain expires? The grace period, redemption phase, pending delete and the final drop — day by day.

Whois status codes: lock, penalty, or business as usual?

clientTransferProhibited, serverHold, clientHold, ok… What EPP status codes mean: which are healthy security locks and which are alarms.

Nameservers: the signposts of a domain

What the nameserver lines in whois output mean: spotting hosting/CDN from NS records, detecting migrations, and the most common NS mistakes.

RDAP: the structured successor to whois

What RDAP is, how it differs from whois, and whether whois is dying. What the JSON-based protocol brings, and the honest state of adoption today.

.tr domains: lookup and rules in the TRABIS era

Whois for com.tr, org.tr and bare .tr: what TRABIS is, the end of the paperwork requirement, why individual records are hidden, and why the output looks different.

Domain age and value: what whois data can honestly tell you

Where a domain's age comes from and why it matters. The factors behind domain value — length, extension, history — and the honest limits of automated scores.

DNSSEC: signing DNS answers — and what unsigned really means

Should you worry when a whois result shows DNSSEC as unsigned? With Google and Microsoft themselves unsigned: what the field means, where it helps, how to enable it.