

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

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?
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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.

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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.

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vrikhter
I've been recently doing this using GoDaddy's Bulk domain checker. Checks up
to 500 at a time.

