whois lookup limits - how to work around daily quota/query limits

Question

Hi there,

I'm building a website that allows users to check the availability of international domain names, much like http://instantdomainsearch.com/ . My approach was to do a simple whois lookup on each request, but I'm now realizing that there are pretty harsh daily or hourly limits, e.g. http://www.dns.pl/english/whois.html#11 "Allowed average daily response limit is set to 100 regarding one IP address."

Is there a way to work around this issue? How do all these sites (e.g. www.whois.net etc.) offer this kind of service, without running into problems with the query limits?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Martin

Answer 1

The reason for the rate limiting by those guys is to charge a premium for a service, not because the infrastructure can't handle actual lookup requests. It's called a business model ;) :p

Answer 2

Don't use third party sites to do the query. There's a surprising amount of information on Wikipedia about WHOIS but if I were you, I'd just rig something up to call the GNU whois command (assuming this is on a *nix machine).

Pretty simple and no limits.

Answer 3

Your question is not in the programming domain, as is the answer.

WHOIS sites maintain a database of domain information, that is not easy, nor cheap, data to maintain.

You have no (legal) programmatic way to overcome this issue. What I'm sure you can do is work out a plan with a respected WHOIS provider that will give you access to it's data, without quotas, for a periodic fee.