WHOIS services you trust — Only use

Few things in life are truly free, counting whois data websites.

There are a lot of great sites out there for doing whois lookups. DomainTools, for example, has long been a great source to lookup a domain and get extraneous information regarding the domain/site.

But you need to be careful which sites you use if you value your privacy.

Non-registrar whois sites make money in one or more ways: advertising, subscription fees, data collection.

If you don’t see advertising or links to other service, and you’re not paying any fee to use the service, remember: you are the product. It’s likely that the whois service is using your searches for some sort of data purpose.

Another thing to watch out for is how public your whois searches are. This weekend I saw a news release for whois site BehindDomain.com. BehindDomain has a very nice interface for displaying whois results. It does a good job calling out key dates in a simple, uncluttered view.

It also displays recent whois searches directly on its home page!

You certainly wouldn’t want to do a whois lookup for a domain you were thinking regarding buying.

Just for kicks, I did a whois lookup for DomainTools.com on BehindDomain.