Who provides a WHOIS API?

Question

Anyone can do WHOIS lookups through the whois command line tool or web based interfaces direct from the registrar but there are query limits which make commercial use difficult e.g. bulk checking of expiry dates on all your existing domains is not possible once you have more than x domains, where x is whatever thw WHOIS server query limit is.

I have found Domain Search XML API but are there any other providers of WHOIS APIs?

Answer 1

Have you contacted your domain registrar? They should be able to have your IP address white listed so you can do bulk queries.

Answer 2

@pelleg I think it's unlikely my registrar would have an API I could use. The NIC is where I would need to put this request in but limits are defined on a NIC level and I'd need to contact a lot of them.

Answer 3

It's in PHP but are you looking for something like this?

Answer 4

@Ross

This is what I have been using but it is still subject to the restrictions imposed by the WHOIS servers it is comunicating with.

Answer 5

@DavidM You might be suprised. At the registrar I used to work for, if you had a large number of domains, we would set up a reseller account for you. We then had a set of services which reseller code could query (our service would then in turn talk to the registries).

Answer 6

This seems to be a great Whois XML API Webservice: www.whoisxmlapi.com It provides structured XML and JSON and raw output for domain name whois lookups. It automatically queries the correct registry and can handle high volume queries. The parser seems to be fantastic. It is able to parse the whois data into detailed components.

Answer 7

I also recommend Whois API as the best Whois Service

Answer 8

Remembered this question, and just found this web service.

http://www.webservicex.net/WCF/ServiceDetails.aspx?SID=51

Answer 9

I have a WCF / C# based Whois Service on Google Code that's open to extension and fairly similar to what www.whoisxmlapi.com serves up. Initially it was using telnet to lookup records from the publicly available whois servers, but Shared Hosting prevented access to port 43. It now scrapes whois records from a web page.

The basic URI is http://adam.kahtava.com/services/whois.{xml|json}?query={ipAddress}

View all available URIs at http://adam.kahtava.com/publicly-available-web-services/

As mentioned the source code is here.

Answer 10

Even I would prefer this WHO IS API.But the only glitch is that they provide for just 100 free lookups which sounds inefficient while doing bulk searches or even registrations.

Answer 11

Here's another newest service provider. http://getwhoisxml.com/