Whois history lookup - Is this possible?

[Chris_C]

Hello,

Does anyone know if it's possible to find out the whois history of a domain?

What I'm looking for is a record of all previous whois records including any transfers.

Is this possible?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[RJ]

Dialog.Com has a database of former WHOIS records. It's fairly complete for the past several years and costs $2 to $4 per record you view.

http://support.dialog.com/publications/chronolog/200211/1021130.shtml

I've used it several times and it works 'ok'. Its easy to waste a lot of money doing lookups.

 

[Chris_C]

whew, yes I can imagine it is considering some domains have changed hands many times. I'm suprised wayback machine doesn't record that type of information as well.

 

[RJ]

Also check Alexa.com. Often they'll have outdated contact information for a domain listed. Occasionally it's helpful to see who the previous owner was.

 

[Chris_C]

Sigh, yah I've done some searching on the net and it seems the dialog.com site is the only one offering historical whois. Oh well, I guess it's potentially worthwhile for top level domains.

 

[fle8]

Sorry to reopen this old thread, but I thought you might want to know that you can now do historical lookups at http://www.whois.sc/ . However, you will need a silver membership there, which costs $15 per month.

 

[Chris_C]

thanks fle8

Yah I did discover that as well in the interim.

 

[lotsofissues]

Hopefully whois-search will launch his free (?) whois history service soon.

 

[HFear]

Originally posted by lotsofissues
Hopefully whois-search will launch his free (?) whois history service soon.

LOL, I hope so. I don't know why anyone would want to pay for a whois history service. It should be free!

 

[Raf]

You might want to check out www.whois.sc for a website that offers such a service.

 

[Grrilla]

Try this->http://web.archive.org/collections/web.htmlWayBack Machine
Even shows dates that changes were made on the website.
Effectiveness is sometimes a little sporadic - ie not 100% of the sites will get results.

Oops doesn't show the whois- Just dates that give you a peripheral idea of what the site looked lke at diff pts in time, but no hard facts.

 

[Raf]

Yeah thats a really good resource Grrilla for checking what your site was in the past if the domain was registered from a previous owner.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by Grrilla
Try this->http://web.archive.org/collections/web.htmlWayBack Machine
Even shows dates that changes were made on the website.
Effectiveness is sometimes a little sporadic - ie not 100% of the sites will get results.

Oops doesn't show the whois- Just dates that give you a peripheral idea of what the site looked lke at diff pts in time, but no hard facts.

I thought of WayBack too, when I read this thread. I guess it doesn't work for whois info, but it definitely can show you the "history" of a domain name.