Whois.com

Sometimes I feel like my reviews are a bit too long considering what I’m actually reviewing. Thankfully, WhoIs has kind of expanded on the number of services they offer over the past few years; otherwise, I’d be stuck reviewing a 1-second spy tool for an hour. You should have already heard of the standard “who is” lookup. It’s a method that’s publically available to everyone around the world. It’s basically a request to see the registry information for a given domain. In other words, it’s how you check the name, address and registration dates of specific domains if you know their address.

This is a great way to start exploring the value of specific domains, regardless of your intention. Usually, you’d be doing a lookup on domains you’re interested in purchasing, but I guess you could also have reason to spy on your competitors. That’s also a thing. Either way, it’s a publically available service and it’s always going to be free, as far as I’d venture to guess. Keep in mind that the information you see is just the public information that the domain owner has decided to publically share. If the domain is hosted somewhere in Tonga, chances are you won’t be seeing any information on there at all. Different countries mean different laws and regulations.

As for WhoIs.Com, well, they’re a private company who were lucky enough to get their hands on an amazing domain. Now, they’re basically a one-stop-shop for all kinds of web tools. This review focuses specifically on the e-mail finding capabilities of their WhoIs lookup, but that basically means I’m cover the entire goddamn lookup, because it’s one fucking tool. There’s a lot of information here. I’ll try to be thorough. We can also skim through some of their other tools, because they’re pretty damn useful, so you might as well know that they exist.

The Who Is Lookup

So you want to find the e-mail address for a specific business and all you have to go by is their website. Well, you could check out their contact information, if any is listed. Most websites these days will have you enter your message into a form, but that’s no good if you want to add them to your mailing list and send them pictures of titties in the form of marketing. Or is it marketing in the form of titties? I’m not sure. Anyways, for those days when you really need an actual e-mail address, the WhoIs lookup is coming to your rescue.

You plop in the URL for the domain you’re curious about and you get a dump of text that gives you all kinds of insider information, including but not limited to the name of the person that registered the domain and their personal data. Granted, every serious business owner protects their information by having an actual company be the owner of their website. On top of that, they use all kinds of proxies for their phone numbers, addresses, and the like. You’re not going to get anyone's home address here, unless someone fucked up royally.

Hell, most business owners will have their intermediaries fill in all the information for them so that there’s no actual personal touch on there. Either way, you’ll get an e-mail address. This is the address that domain owners usually expect to see offers for their domains. If you’re looking to buy someone’s domain, you’d write them to this address. That should be obvious. Now, what you use this address for is entirely up to you. You can market to it. It’s not illegal. Hell, it’s not even unethical. It’s a fucking e-mail address. Go nuts. Just keep in mind that it’s common practice to use an e-mail that’s dedicated to the actual domain hosting process for the WhoIs information of a site. In other words, you might wait a ridiculously long time to get a response from one of these bad boys if you’re expecting one.

There Are Better Ways

If you’re curious about one specific domain and you need a single e-mail address, then WhoIs is the place to be. On the other hand, if you’re trying to general a mailing list, you’re shit out of luck. You can’t generate those bad boys programmatically through a script. You have to enter the domains manually. I guess you could try to automate the process and use a bot, but I’m 99.9% sure that the website will bounce you and hide behind a Captcha to make sure that you aren’t spamming them. They don’t have an autonomous API, as far as I can tell.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. You can run a WhoIs lookup directly – you don’t need third-party software. You can literally do it from your own PC. So, what’s the upside to this whole website? The additional tools. If you’re looking for some sort of sleuth tool that’ll sift through an entire goddamn website and fetch you e-mails that you would otherwise have to get your hands on manually, well, that’s Hunter. Alternatively, check the other tools on this list. WhoIs is more of a generic one-stop-shop for some lateral web tools that are definitely helpful.

Domain Registration

At this point, I’d be surprised if WhoIs didn’t offer domain sales. You’re free to register a domain, compare prices and check out special offers that might be active on the site at any given time. They also help you transfer your domain in case you’ve just gotten your hands on a new address and you want to jump ship. They also note that if you purchase a domain through them, you get over $100 worth of services. So, they’re very willing to bundle their various products. They’re trying to be a holistic domain service for small business owners. That makes them a real bookmark-worthy destination.

The premium domains section is probably the most interesting spot if you’re a webmaster looking to break through to the mainstream. You enter a keyword you’re interested in and they list you all the top-notch domains that are currently on sale pertaining to that keyword. For example, I put in “anal” just to see what comes up and I saw that HardAnal.Com is on sale for $4000. That’s a good deal. Granted, the tool isn’t magic. It also listed sites like “AnalHerpes” and “AnalogDisplay”, so… yeah, it’s a bit literal. Either way, the tool works great. I’d advise you to check it out once in a while to see what’s on offer.

Hosting and E-Mail

They also have so many options around the hosting and e-mail provision – I literally can’t go through it all. They cater to both small businesses and enterprise solutions, so by all means, dig into that kind of shit if you want a premium solution. I personally don’t think that they had porn webmasters in mind when they set up these e-mail packages. I doubt they’d be cool with the whole spam approach if that’s what you had in mind. Either way, if you want to go pro with your e-mail server, they’ve got you covered. There’s always an extra layer of security when you lease out a third-party server.

The same goes for the hosting. They even offer this kind of high tier security solution for your own website, regardless of hosting. Like I said – it’s a one-stop-shop for all top-level webmaster goings-on. The bottom line here is that you get access to proper support with all of these services. So, you could do all of these things yourself, but if you run operations through WhoIs, you have a helping hand. You’re never alone. For those moments when you’re scared and you want to make damn sure that you’re covered, it’s smart to go with a third-party solution. I can’t say much for their track record, except that I don’t see anyone complaining about what they’re offering. They don’t have any testimonials on here, so I guess you’ll have to try them out on your own.

So, to recap: WhoIs.Com is a great place for a quick and simple e-mail and domain information checks, but if you’re looking to build an e-mailing list, go for a specialized tool. This website comes with a manual tool that’s augmented with a ton of paid solutions for webmasters who are looking to build and grow.