How do I know when a domain was registered for the first time?

[elopeuniversal1]

I’m new to domains and I was wondering how can I find out when a domain was first registered?
The reason I ask is because I see domains on expired lists all the time and I wanted to know how old they are.

 

[robert_jones]

Well, there are many ways to tell this.

The first and most obvious was is to just do a quick WHOIS look up from any WHOIS website like whois.net and look at what shows up in the “creation date” area. That should tell you what date the domain was originally registered (unless the name was dropped and was reregistered again).

Other options are to try and get the creation date from a service like Domain Tools or to use free services like archive.org or hosterstats.com

Hope that helps.

 

[FPForum]

Your best two options are either Domain Tools (which costs money)..or visit web.archive.org and plug the URL in.. Go back in time and see if you can find the first time it was archived. The first option will be the most accurate.

 

[forge]

You can do a free Whois lookup at DomainTools that should give some history of Whois records, though like Wayback Machine isn't always accurate.