# WHOIS Lookup Guide

Show registrar, registration and expiry dates, status and nameservers for a domain.

- Tool: https://ilham.dev/tools/whois-lookup/
- Guide URL: https://ilham.dev/guides/whois-lookup/
- Tool guides index: https://ilham.dev/guides/tools/
- Broader guide: Network Debugging Notes (https://ilham.dev/guides/network-debugging/)

## What it does

Show the registrar, registration and expiry dates, status codes and nameservers for a domain. It reads the registry's own RDAP service, discovered from the IANA bootstrap directory, so there is no third-party proxy in the middle. When a registry publishes no RDAP service at all, the tool says so instead of guessing.

## Use the tool

Open https://ilham.dev/tools/whois-lookup/, add the input the tool asks for, run it, and check the output before using it elsewhere.

## Input and output

- Input: text.
- Output: text.
- Category: Network.

## Privacy and processing
This tool needs a network request to complete the lookup or test. Send only data you are comfortable sharing with the target service.

## Questions

### Why do some domains return nothing?

A few registries publish no RDAP endpoint at all — .io, .co, .de and several other ccTLDs among them. Without one there is no machine-readable record to fetch.

### Why is the registrant hidden?

Since GDPR, most registries redact personal details on private registrations. The tool tells you when the response has been redacted rather than showing blanks.

### What is the difference between RDAP and WHOIS?

RDAP is the structured HTTPS replacement for the old port-43 WHOIS protocol. It returns JSON instead of free text, so the fields can be labelled reliably rather than pattern-matched.