What is Whois?

No the title of this article was not a typo. I did not mean to say, “What is Who is?”. Why? Well, that wouldn’t make much sense now would it? Now “What is Whois?” does make a lot more sense, at least it will by the time you are done reading this article.

A quick search on Google will define a Whois search:

A searchable database maintained by the registrar, which contains information about networks, networking organizations, domain names, and the contacts associated with them for respective domains. Also, the set of rules that describes the application used to access the database.

Now what does that all mean? Well, unless when you registered your domain you selected to do a “private registration”, all your information you registered with is out there for the public to see. Your name, phone number, address and more can be reached by anybody who is able to do a Whois search.

So, only a select few Online must be able to do these “Whois” domain name searches right? Wrong. Anybody and their grandmother can do them. Anybody can find out whatever information they want to about you that is listed under your domain name’s profile in the Whois search.

That doesn’t sound right, now does it? In my opinion this is really an outdated method of getting things done. When we were still in the early days of the Online world, this was okay. It was okay because only about twelve people had Web sites. These days though, with the number of Web sites expanding into the billions, it has become more of a security problem than anything.

Where can you do a Whois search? Well just about every domain name register has one on their Web site, and a search on Google for Whois will turn up about four million more. They all pretty much do the same thing so picking one over the other is not that big of a deal.

So next time you register your domain name somewhere, you might think about what information you do want out there about you. If you want to stay private, it might be time to look into getting a privately registered domain name.