10

As far as I know the two publicly available whois servers for .com and .net domains are:

whois.verisign-grs.com

and 

whois.crsnic.net

Questions:

  1. Are there others I missed?
  2. Does anyone know the limit of queries you can send to them from the same IP (e.g., per day, week or month)?
Daniel Scocco
  • 215

2 Answers2

8

whois.verisign-grs.com and whois.crsnic.net points to the same WHOIS interface.

Here's the result of a dig query request.

;; ANSWER SECTION:
whois.crsnic.net.   1   IN  A   199.7.59.74

;; ANSWER SECTION:
whois.verisign-grs.com. 1   IN  A   199.7.59.74

According to the IANA database, the authoritative URL is whois.verisign-grs.com. However, I confirm the old one is still working.

Changing the URL doesn't give you more flexibility against request limits as they point to the same interface.

Verisign doesn't disclose the WHOIS limit.

Dear ...,

Thank you for contacting VeriSign.

We apologize but we are not allowed to disclose internal information. You will be notified once your IP is blocked from our Whois database.

Please know that your inquiry is important to us, and we value your business.

On some forums you can read it was around 1000 requests per day.

Simone Carletti
  • 1,534
0

  1. Whois servers list can be found http://www.nirsoft.net/whois_servers_list.html which provides Whois servers in format:

    • co whois.nic.co
    • com whois.verisign-grs.com
    • net whois.verisign-grs.com
    • info whois.afilias.info

Or https://raw.githubusercontent.com/whois-server-list/whois-server-list/master/whois-server-list.xml provides XML structured format with extension, server, availability pattern and other information.

  1. Depends on the server and extension.

Simone said:

On some forums you can read it was around 1000 requests per day.

You may get timeout or exception after 1000 requests if they are done very quickly but after retry a server should process them. It should not be a problem to query 1 million .com less in a half day, but you will stuck with 1 million .info domain name queries.

Justas
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