How Do I Find Out Who Registered A Domain Name

What is a Domain Name?

Summary

Domain names are a central office of the Cyberspace infrastructure. They provide a human-readable address for any spider web server available on the Internet.

Any Cyberspace-connected computer tin be reached through a public IP address, either an IPv4 address (e.g. 173.194.121.32) or an IPv6 accost (e.k., 2027:0da8:8b73:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:1337).

Computers can handle such addresses easily, but people accept a hard time finding out who's running the server or what service the website offers. IP addresses are hard to recall and might alter over time.

To solve all those issues we utilize human-readable addresses called domain names.

Deeper dive

Structure of domain names

A domain name has a simple construction made of several parts (it might exist one office only, two, three...), separated by dots and read from right to left:

Anatomy of the MDN domain name

Each of those parts provides specific information nigh the whole domain name.

TLD (Top-Level Domain).

TLDs tell users the general purpose of the service behind the domain name. The well-nigh generic TLDs (.com, .org, .net) don't crave spider web services to meet any detail criteria, only some TLDs enforce stricter policies so it is clearer what their purpose is. For example:

Local TLDs such as .us, .fr, or .se can require the service to be provided in a given language or hosted in a sure state — they are supposed to indicate a resources in a particular linguistic communication or country.
TLDs containing .gov are but allowed to be used by government departments.
The .edu TLD is only for use by educational and academic institutions.

TLDs can contain special every bit well as latin characters. A TLD's maximum length is 63 characters, although most are around ii–three.

The total list of TLDs is maintained by ICANN.

Label (or component)

The labels are what follow the TLD. A characterization is a example-insensitive graphic symbol sequence anywhere from one to sixty-three characters in length, containing just the messages A through Z, digits 0 through 9, and the - character (which may non be the first or last character in the label). a, 97, and hello-strange-person-sixteen-how-are-yous are all examples of valid labels.

The label located right earlier the TLD is also called a Secondary Level Domain (SLD).

A domain name can have many labels (or components). Information technology is non mandatory nor necessary to accept three labels to form a domain name. For instance, www.inf.ed.ac.uk is a valid domain name. For whatever domain you control (e.g. mozilla.org), you can create "subdomains" with different content located at each, like developer.mozilla.org, iot.mozilla.org, or wiki.developer.mozilla.org.

Buying a domain name

Who owns a domain name?

You cannot "purchase a domain name". This is then that unused domain names eventually become available to use again by someone else. If every domain name was bought, the web would quickly fill with unused domain names that were locked and couldn't be used by anyone.

Instead, you lot pay for the right to use a domain proper noun for 1 or more years. You can renew your right, and your renewal has priority over other people's applications. Simply you lot never own the domain name.

Companies called registrars use domain name registries to go along track of technical and administrative information connecting you to your domain name.

Note: For some domain name, it might non be a registrar which is in charge of keeping track. For instance, every domain name nether .fire is managed by Amazon.

Finding an available domain proper name

To find out whether a given domain name is available,

Go to a domain proper noun registrar'south website. Virtually of them provide a "whois" service that tells you whether a domain proper name is available.

Alternatively, if you utilise a system with a congenital-in shell, blazon a whois command into information technology, as shown here for mozilla.org:

$ whois mozilla.org Domain Proper name:MOZILLA.ORG Domain ID: D1409563-LROR Creation Date: 1998-01-24T05:00:00Z Updated Date: 2013-12-08T01:xvi:57Z Registry Death Date: 2015-01-23T05:00:00Z Sponsoring Registrar:MarkMonitor Inc. (R37-LROR) Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 292 WHOIS Server: Referral URL: Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited Registrant ID:mmr-33684 Registrant Name:DNS Admin Registrant Organization:Mozilla Foundation Registrant Street: 650 Castro St Ste 300 Registrant City:Mountain View Registrant State/Province:CA Registrant Postal Code:94041 Registrant Land:U.s. Registrant Phone:+i.6509030800

As you tin can see, I can't register mozilla.org because the Mozilla Foundation has already registered it.

On the other manus, permit'due south come across if I could register afunkydomainname.org:

$ whois afunkydomainname.org NOT FOUND

Every bit you tin run into, the domain does not exist in the whois database (at the time of writing), so nosotros could enquire to register it. Good to know!

Getting a domain name

The procedure is quite straightforward:

Go to a registrar's website.
Usually there is a prominent "Get a domain name" phone call to action. Click on it.
Fill out the grade with all required details. Make sure peculiarly that you lot have not misspelled your desired domain proper name. In one case it'south paid for, it's too belatedly!
The registrar will permit you know when the domain name is properly registered. Within a few hours, all DNS servers volition have received your DNS information.

Note: In this process the registrar asks you for your real-world address. Make sure y'all fill it properly, since in some countries registrars may be forced to close the domain if they cannot provide a valid address.

DNS refreshing

DNS databases are stored on every DNS server worldwide, and all these servers refer to a few special servers called "authoritative proper name servers" or "top-level DNS servers." — these are like the boss servers that manage the system.

Whenever your registrar creates or updates whatsoever data for a given domain, the information must exist refreshed in every DNS database. Each DNS server that knows near a given domain stores the information for some time before information technology is automatically invalidated and then refreshed (the DNS server queries an authoritative server and fetches the updated information from it). Thus, it takes some time for DNS servers that know about this domain name to go the up-to-date information.

How does a DNS request work?

As nosotros already saw, when you want to display a webpage in your browser information technology's easier to blazon a domain name than an IP address. Let's take a look at the process:

Type mozilla.org in your browser's location bar.
Your browser asks your calculator if information technology already recognizes the IP address identified by this domain proper noun (using a local DNS enshroud). If information technology does, the name is translated to the IP address and the browser negotiates contents with the spider web server. End of story.
If your calculator does not know which IP is behind the mozilla.org name, it goes on to ask a DNS server, whose job is precisely to tell your estimator which IP address matches each registered domain name.
Now that the estimator knows the requested IP address, your browser can negotiate contents with the spider web server.

Explanation of the steps needed to obtain the result to a DNS request

Next steps

Okay, we talked a lot virtually processes and architecture. Time to move on.

If you want to go hands-on, it'south a good time to outset digging into pattern and explore the anatomy of a web page.
Information technology's also worth noting that some aspects of edifice a website cost money. Please refer to how much it costs to build a web site.
Or read more than nearly Domain Names on Wikipedia.
You can also detect hither a fun and colorful explanation of how DNS works.