What does Whois do?

Using InternetPeriscope's Whois Tools, you can:

• Find out if a domain name has been registered
  
• Perform a Wild Card Search, searching for all domain names that begin with a word you specify.
  
• Find the name, address, email, phone number, and fax number of a domain name's owner.
  
• Find the name, address, email, phone number, and fax number of an IP address's owner (usually, this is an ISP).
  
• Find out which domains (up to 50) are hosted by an ISP.

InternetPeriscope looks up this information by connecting to registries. The figure below shows a listing of these registries that can be found in the Whois (domain name) Tool.


When searching for a domain name, you will usually want to start with the whois.networksolutions.com registry. whois.networksolutions.com is one of several registries that allow you to register domain names that end with .com, .org, .net, and other extensions. Using InternetPeriscope's Whois Tool, you can find out if a domain name has been registered, and if so, to whom.

You can also use InternetPeriscope to find out who owns an IP Address. You might want to do this if you detected a hacker intrusion, and wish to notify the hacker's ISP, or if you received email spam, and wished to notify the spammer's ISP.