Domain Lookup

Instant Domain Search does a domain lookup on every letter that you type. This is much faster than a WHOIS lookup to see if a domain name is available. We think it’s important to show domain registration results quickly so you can brainstorm without waiting for results to show. There are several ways to lookup domain names. You can do a DNS lookup, an EPP lookup, or a WHOIS lookup.

DNS lookups are designed to convert human-readable names, like instantdomainsearch.com, into machine-readable numbers, like 130.211.25.142. Every time you type a domain name into a web browser, your computer does a DNS lookup to find a server somewhere on the internet. DNS lookups are designed to be very fast, and can tell you quickly if a domain name is already in use. If you are comfortable with the command prompt, you can try using the dig tool to do your own DNS lookups: dig instantdomainsearch.com. Instant Domain Search is fast because it first does an optimized DNS lookup to see if your name is available, and then follows-up with an EPP lookup to double check.

EPP is designed for registrars to manage domain names people register with them. Doing an EPP check is the authoritative way to see if a domain is available to register. In practice, it can take up to a second for registrars to answer EPP lookups. Because EPP lookups ultimately require an expensive database lookup, registrars need to limit the number of EPP queries they handle at once.

WHOIS lookups were designed to find the contact information for the domain registrants, and other details about it such as when it was first registered, its current status, and when it expires.

Unfortunately, spammers abused the protocol to extract personal information from domain names and continue to abuse WHOIS lookups. Most domain registrars allow you to register your domain name privately to help hide your information from spammers and scammers.

Domain registrars are constantly fighting spammers who try to get information from their WHOIS records that they will usually make you prove that you are a human before showing you WHOIS results. You can try doing a WHOIS lookup from your computer using the command prompt: whois instantdomainsearch.com.

Many domain registries publish zone files once or twice a day to help make DNS queries more efficient. Every night, we build an optimized index of over a hundred million domain names from several hundred zone files and host the index on fast servers all over the world. When you type, our software finds the closest server to you and does a simplified DNS lookup to get results back to you as quickly as possible. It’s so fast that the slowest part is usually waiting for your web browser to render all of the search results.