How to find out the owner of a domain

The first thing to do before launching a website is to register a domain and rent hosting. Choosing a domain name that is easy to read, pronounce, and remember is a difficult and long process. And it may often seem that the time spent on selecting several dozen website addresses and brainstorming to choose the best one is wasted. After all, when you try to buy such a domain, you get a message that it is already registered.

If you encounter such a situation, don't rush to get upset. There are several ways to find out the owner of the domain and get his or her contacts. With this information, you can contact him and find out if he wants to sell the website address. The phone number or email of the domain name owner will also come in handy in a number of other cases. For example, if you want to offer cooperation but can't find any contacts on the website.

It should be noted right away that when you are going to buy an abandoned domain, you will probably hear a price that exceeds the cost of a new domain name by several times. But when a beautiful web address that will become an element of the brand is at stake, the game is worth the candle.

How to find out the owner of the site yourself

The easiest way to determine the owner of a domain is to use WHOIS, a network protocol that provides access to public databases of IP and domain name registrars. Initially, WHOIS could only be used by entering a query on the command line. Since this is inconvenient for non-technically savvy users, websites with a clear web interface for obtaining such information have appeared. For example, https://www.whois.com/whois/.

To determine the owner of a domain using whois.com, enter the URL of the online resource in the Enter Domain Name or IP Address field and click the Search button. On the page that opens, you will see the following information about the web address:

• date of registration (created);
• registration expiration date (expires);
• name of the registrant (person, person-loc);
• name of the company-owner (organisation, organisation-loc);
• electronic mail (e-mail);
• address of the registrant (address, postal-code, country, address-loc, country-loc);
• telephone number (phone), fax number (fax).

Finally, it is worth noting that some domain name registrars offer the service of hiding WHOIS information. This is a big step towards creating a more ethical, private and confidential Internet. But at the same time, it is an unnecessary headache for anyone who wants to buy a website address with hidden WHOIS data or check the domain owner for some other reason. In such cases, we recommend searching for the person or company that owns the domain on Facebook.

To do this, enter the query site:facebook.com "example.com" in the Google search bar, where example.com is the domain name you are interested in. Review the search engine results and send a message to the Facebook page that contains the address of the website you are interested in in the information block.