Who owns that domain?

WHOIS is the public directory of domain registrations. Every time a domain is registered, the registry records who the sponsoring registrar is, when the domain was created, when it expires and which nameservers it uses. A WHOIS lookup simply reads that record and shows it to you.

Today most registries publish this data through RDAP, the modern replacement for the old WHOIS protocol. Our tool uses RDAP first, so the answers come straight from the registry in a consistent, machine-readable format.

Since 2018, privacy laws such as the GDPR and the ICANN Temporary Specification require registrars to hide personal data from public records. Most registrars also include free WHOIS privacy, which replaces the owner’s details with a proxy contact. That is why lookups show the registrar, dates and nameservers but not the person behind the domain.

If you need to reach the owner, for example to buy the domain, use the registrar’s abuse or contact address shown in the result, or the contact form on the website itself. Registrars forward legitimate messages to the registrant.

Status codes are flags set by the registrar or the registry. “Client transfer prohibited” means the domain is locked against transfers, which is a normal security setting; the owner unlocks it before moving to another registrar. “Client update prohibited” and “client delete prohibited” work the same way for edits and deletion.

Codes beginning with “server”, such as “server hold”, are set by the registry and usually indicate a problem such as an unpaid renewal or a dispute. “Pending delete” means the domain is about to be released, and “redemption period” means it has expired and can still be restored by its owner for a fee.

The result card shows the expiry date and how many days remain. When a domain expires, the owner usually has a grace period of around 30 days to renew at the normal price, followed by a redemption period of about 30 days in which it can be restored for an extra fee. Only after a further short “pending delete” phase, roughly five days, is the name released for anyone to register.

In practice a domain that expires today is unlikely to be available for at least 60 to 75 days, and popular names are often renewed or picked up by drop-catching services the moment they are released.

You have a few options. Use “Find a similar name” to see the same name on other extensions and related names that are available. Check the expiry date; if it is close and the site looks abandoned, you can try to buy it from the owner through the registrar contact, or place a backorder. Or, if you already own the domain with another provider, click “Transfer it to Sailexhost” to move it to us and manage everything in one place.

It fetches the site the way a browser would and reports whether it is online, how fast it responded, the page title and description, the picture the site uses when shared on social media, what it appears to be built with, and whether its SSL certificate is valid and who issued it. The screenshot is captured live, so it may take a few seconds to appear the first time a site is looked up.

Nameservers are the servers that answer DNS questions for a domain; they tell the internet where the website and email live. MX records name the mail servers that receive email for the domain, which is why we can often tell whether a site uses Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. TXT records hold verification and email-security settings such as SPF and DMARC, which tell receiving mail servers who is allowed to send email on the domain’s behalf.

Yes. Registration records, DNS and the public parts of a website are open information published by the registries and by the site itself, and looking them up is entirely legal. We do not store your searches or link them to you; the lookup happens in real time and nothing is kept once the page has been shown. The screenshot is produced by a third-party service that receives only the domain name.