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Ask HN: How do you check avaialbility of domain names?

2 points by dholowiski ↗ HN
Every once in a while there is a project that checks the availability of a large number of domain names at once. How do you go about this? Are their domain name registrars that offer an API (that allow a huge number of requests) - or are these people just doing piles of whois queries?

5 comments

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khanklatt
I would guess they are doing whois queries, but be careful that you don't inadvertently get yourself blocked.

Another point of caution-- perhaps it is just urban legend, but I've heard that some shady registrars capture the domain you're looking up temporarily so you can't register it anywhere else.

That (possibly unreasonable) fear is why I find myself checking the existence of a domain from the CLI before I actually use my registrar of choice to register it.

dholowiski
I think I will just do a DNS lookup, unless I can think of anything better. If a domain name hasn't been resolved then it probably hasn't been registered.

I heard that same urban legend... actually years ago that seemed to be true, but recently I've noticed that not happenning.

profitbaron
That isn't an urban legend - I know of 2 registrars that used to do it - One of them used to do it so you would have to acquire them off them for an increased price.

Network Solutions were exposed for doing this.

grah4
Not a myth. It happened a few years ago to me for several (totally random) domains. Since then I've also changed to checking from the CLI.
vrikhter
I've been recently doing this using GoDaddy's Bulk domain checker. Checks up to 500 at a time.