Audience: This guide is useful if you have decided to do-it-yourself, directly registering your own domain name and need to learn how to identity an available domain name to register. If you are using a web services agency like Walking Dolphins Consultancy the article will be only of interest in understanding the process, but you will not have to actually execute any of the steps. Instead go directly to our Domain Research Request Form.

There are many ways to discover if your domain name is available or research information about an existing domain name.

If your research is to find a name that you can register yourself, the safest way to do your research is to use InterNIC.

“Safer?”

There are many anecdotes about people using a private registrar site to see if a domain name is available finding it is and thinking on it for a few hours (possibly shopping for better pricing) only to discover that someone has put a hold on the name. It suddenly is available but now it is available only at an inflated resale price.

How much this actually happens is questionable and if registrars themselves are involved there is no way to prove it. All the same, by using the non-profit institution responsible for all .com, .org, .net and .info domains you are protected and no one will even know you are searching for a particular domain.

So our tutorial assumes you will go to the InterNIC whois server. In which case you’ll see a screen like the one shown here. Note that we have typed in the domain securesurfing.net.

Let’s click on the Submit button to see what we get:

For our purpose of trying to find a name for our own registration, the most important thing we learn is that the name is indeed already registered. We know that because InterNIC returned a result with the domain name and registrar. So we will have to pick a variation and try a new search. If getting your own domain is all you want to know right now, skip down to the Next Search section.

But lets take a look at the other information we can learn from this result. We see that the Registrar is a company listed as “COMPUTER SERVICES LANGENBACH GMBH DBA JOKER.COM.” It is important to realize that this is not the Registrant, but the Registrar.

The Registrant is the legal owner of the domain. The Registrar is the service through which the domain was purchased or “registered.” If we want to find the actual owners name we will have to go to the private whois server of this particular Registrar and it is listed right there for us as whois.joker.com.

Note also that the Name server entries (DNS) appear completely unrelated to the Registrar. And they are. In the case of securesurfing.net, although the name was registered through the company with that “big name/joker.com,” the site’s DNS is managed through lunarmania.com. What this means is that if you go to securesurfing.net, you see content that is physically served from hardware owned by the company Lunarpages Web Hosting . This is what is meant by “hosting.” A web site is physically hosted on machines rented from someone else.

This not uncommon, and the Secure Surfing Organization recommends it. By keeping your Registrar separate from your Hosting provider, you maintain a higher level of independence and freedom of action. You do have to manage your own DNS entries with your registrar but any reputable registrar has interfaces that make it easy to do and really you should not have to make changes very often.

So, pretending that we want to see who actually owns this domain name, let’s pop over to joker.com. Along with all the advertising and pitches, we see at the top of the screen a who is search box (note the image is as of July 10,2009. They can change it any time, but there will always be who is search box located somewhere):

So here we go again. We type in “securesurfing.net” and click the go button to get:

So what’s this all about??

InterNIC told us the domain was registered through joker.com and now joker.com is telling us the registrant name is something called RegistryWeb in Turramurra, Australia!

We want to get hold of the Admin contact to see if they will sell us the domain. So we click on the mysterious looking link “CNET-623532? only to be told we should go to whois.registryweb.com for more information.

What’s going on here?

If you go back to the home page of joker.com you will see that one big piece of their business is signing on Resellers. A reseller is not a Registrar in their own right, but operates under the credentials of a fully qualified registrar. In this case, InterNIC sent us to joker.com because the company that owns joker is the fully certified registrar, and has ultimate responsibility for ensuring that all the policies and procedures binding a registrar are followed. Joker in turn has signed up RegistryWeb as a reseller. So it seems that the owner of the domain name securesurfing.net has chosen RegistryWeb as his registrar. So to summarize the tail chasing:

InterNIC –> joker.com –> RegistryWeb.

If we go to whois.registryweb.com we can finally enter the domain name and get a meaningful result. (Note: most web addresses that start with whois such as whois.joker.com will not work with a web browser but require a whois client. In this case Registryweb redirects the browser to an html form that does work with your browser.)

We’ll not clutter the page with a screen capture of the search form, but here is the result when we enter securesurfing.net into that form:

So now we find that the domain name is owned by a company called Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc. (the sponsor of the Secure Surfing Organization) and we get a contact e-mail address for the owner in the person of one Glenn Caleval.

If we want to try to buy the domain name from him, we can now send him a formal offer. It is very unlikely that legitimate registrants are willing or able to sell their domains without extracting a very high price. You are much better off going the route of searching for alternatives.

Next Search

At the start. as soon as we see InterNIC return a result, we know that we cannot register the domain directly. So let’s look up another one to try to find an open domain. Normally this would be one similar to the original, but we’re using one that we happen to know is available so that you can see the result. For this example, pretend that we checked josephsamazingcoat.com and found it was already registered. We decide that josephswonderfulcoat.com will do, so we enter it into the search at InterNIC and the result we get is:

The key words are “No match for domain…” and we know that it was not registered as of the date and time shown.

And that is as simple as it gets to research a domain name to register or to buy if you want to go through the tracking process to identify the existing owner. Of course you can avoid all of this searching which usually takes many more attempts than two, by simply letting Walking Dolphins do it for you.

But if you want to stick with the DIY route , your next task is to choose a registrar.