How to find out who owns a website domain name
Posted on February 12, 2008 at 7:27 am
Wouldn’t it be nice to know who owned certain websites? Whether you want to verify a domain name or see when one expires (so that you can purchase it), the WHO IS database is the way to go. By visiting www.whois.net, you can not only find out who owns a certain domain name, but also when it was purchased and more importantly, when it is due to expire.
Looking up a domain name on www.whois.net is very simple. All you have to do is enter in the web address you want to look up and presto - all the information you wanted will appear. For example, if you look up the website address for the WHO IS site, you will find out some important information. In the screen shot below, we can tell that the domain name was purchased in 1997 and they have paid for it through 2016 (so no luck trying to buy it out from under them anytime soon!).
While WHO IS is a great reference for when you want to find information on someone else’s site, unfortunately, there are also a lot of people using this site to find information about you. I recently did an experiment where I purchased two new domain names and set up email accounts for each domain name using the format info@domainname.com. I then let my personal information be displayed on www.whois.net for one of the sites and purchased the security feature for the other site. (Note: The security feature displays a third party’s information instead of your own, like the one for Host Monster shown below.)
The first site, with all of my information displayed to the public, started receiving spam mail within 1 week of posting the information. Then, even when I removed the information a couple weeks later by purchasing the privacy package, I still continued to receive the junk mail (and haven’t figured out how to get rid of it yet!).
The second site, however, has not received any junk mail in its email account. While this could be a coincidence, I would strongly advice using the privacy feature whenever you register a new domain name to reduce the risk of receiving an inbox full of junk mail.
This is a guest post by Karen Worthy, a tech enthusiast.
Technorati Tags: Internet, websites, webpages, web pages, domain name, registration name, domain name expiration, www.whois.net, who is, web site privacy, privacy, spam, junk mail, preventing spam, finding domain name owners, domain name owners, registering your domain name
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Even though it says that the domain name might expire soon, most companies have an automatic renewal program and it won’t actually expire.
Nice information there, its necessary to have domain privacy, other wise spammers will never leave you.