Look up registration details for any domain — registrar, owner, expiry date, nameservers and domain status. Free, no sign-up needed.
A WHOIS record is the official registration profile of a domain name, stored at the registry level and queried in real time whenever you look it up. It reveals the domain's registrar, when it was first registered, when it was last updated, and critically — when it expires. Beyond the dates, a WHOIS record maps out the nameservers the domain delegates DNS control to, and the status codes that govern what administrative actions are currently permitted.
For investigators, developers and domain buyers, this is often the first stop when researching an unfamiliar domain. It answers the practical questions quickly: Is this domain currently registered? Who sold the registration? Is it about to expire? What DNS infrastructure is it using? Pair WHOIS with a DNS Lookup to see what records those nameservers are actively serving.
Since GDPR came into force in 2018, most registrars apply automatic privacy protection to domain registrations by individuals, replacing personal contact details with proxy information in the public WHOIS record. This is entirely normal and does not signal anything unusual about a domain. The real registrant details are held securely by the registrar and disclosed only through legitimate legal channels — trademark disputes, abuse reports or law enforcement requests.
For business domains, the registrant organisation name often remains visible even when personal contact details are masked. If you need to reach the operator of a domain, most registrars provide a privacy-preserving contact form accessible from the WHOIS record. You can also investigate the domain further using our SSL Checker — a valid certificate often contains organisational identity data even when WHOIS is redacted.
clientTransferProhibited is the most common status and simply means the registrar has locked the domain against unauthorised transfers — this is standard protective behaviour. clientUpdateProhibited and clientDeleteProhibited add further restrictions against modifications and deletion. Together, these three locks form the standard security configuration for most registered domains.
Status codes beginning with server (like serverTransferProhibited) are imposed by the registry itself rather than the registrar, and are common on newly registered domains during ICANN's mandatory 60-day transfer lock. pendingDelete and redemptionPeriod indicate an expired domain approaching deletion — the registrant has a limited window to recover it at a premium price before it re-enters the public registration pool.
The nameservers in a WHOIS record show which provider currently controls DNS for the domain. Nameservers matching cloudflare.com indicate Cloudflare DNS management. Those on awsdns.com point to Amazon Route 53. Nameservers matching the hosting provider's own domain suggest DNS is managed directly at host level. This matters because changing nameservers is how a domain migrates between DNS providers — and the WHOIS nameserver list reflects where DNS authority currently sits, not necessarily where the website is hosted.
After confirming nameservers here, use our DNS Lookup to query those nameservers directly and see the full set of A, AAAA, MX and TXT records they're serving. For security header configuration and HSTS status, our HTTP Headers tool gives a complete picture.
The expiry countdown displayed above is calculated from the registry's expiry date in real time. For domains you own, always enable auto-renewal at your registrar — a single missed renewal email has cost countless website owners their domain to third-party buyers. For high-value domains, consider also enabling registrar-lock (clientTransferProhibited) and keeping the registrant email address current, since renewal notices go to the registrant email on record in WHOIS.
For domains you're watching — competitors, acquisition targets, recently-expired names — bookmark this page and check periodically. When a domain enters redemptionPeriod, the original owner has roughly 30 days to pay a recovery fee (typically $50–200) before it moves to pendingDelete and becomes publicly available again.
Completely free, no account required, no query limits. Each lookup queries the official WHOIS server for the relevant TLD in real time — results are never cached or stored on our servers, and your queries are not logged or tied to any profile. The raw WHOIS output is available in full via the expandable panel above if you need to inspect the unprocessed registry response directly.