Free tool
Look up any domain. Understand what you find.
Registrar, expiry, locks and DNSSEC straight from the registry, plus every important DNS record, each one explained in plain English. No sign-up, runs in your browser.
DNS & WHOIS lookup
Enter a domain to see who it's registered with, when it expires, who runs its DNS, and every important record: A, AAAA, NS, MX, TXT, SOA and CAA.
Registration details come live from the domain's official registry over RDAP, the modern replacement for WHOIS, found via IANA's public directory. DNS records come from public resolvers (Cloudflare, with Google as fallback) over encrypted DNS. Everything runs from your browser: nothing you type here is sent to our servers, and we don't record what you look up.
What a lookup is good for
- Check your own house. When did the domain last get looked at? Who's the registrar, is the transfer lock on, and is auto-renew actually going to fire? Expired domains take the website and every mailbox down with them.
- Investigate a supplier or a suspicious email. A domain registered three weeks ago claiming to be an established company tells you everything. Registration dates don't lie.
- Untangle who runs what. Website with one agency, email with another, DNS with someone who left? The NS and SOA records show who actually holds the keys.
- Spot the leftovers. Old TXT verifications, mail servers that no longer exist and records nobody remembers creating all accumulate. A periodic look keeps the zone honest.
The quiet single point of failure
Your domain is the one thing everything else depends on
Website, email, VPN, Microsoft 365 sign-in: all of it hangs off DNS, and DNS hangs off a renewal payment and a registrar login.
How domains actually get lost
Rarely by attack. Usually the renewal card expired, the reminder emails went to a leaver's mailbox, and nobody noticed until the website vanished and email started bouncing. By the time a domain reaches its redemption period, getting it back costs real money, and if it releases fully, anyone can register it and receive your email. The expiry date in this tool is the single most valuable thing to check.
Put it under proper management
We bring domains, DNS and certificates into managed hands: renewals guaranteed, transfer locks on, name servers somewhere sensible, records documented, and changes monitored around the clock by our network operations centre. It's a small part of our 24×7 IT support, and it removes a genuinely business-ending risk for pennies.
Questions
About this tool
Live from the domain's official registry (Nominet for .uk, Verisign for .com, and so on) over RDAP, which is the modern replacement for the old WHOIS protocol. We look up the right registry for each domain ending using IANA's public directory, so nothing is cached or second-hand. If a registry doesn't offer RDAP or blocks browser lookups, the tool says so honestly rather than guessing.
The old WHOIS protocol dates from the early 1980s: plain text, no structure, no standard fields, and every registry formatted it differently. RDAP is its official successor, serving the same information as structured data over HTTPS. ICANN required gTLD registries to run RDAP from 2019, and the old WHOIS port has been going dark since. Same answers, better plumbing.
Privacy law, mainly GDPR. Since 2018 registries redact the registrant's name and contact details for most domains, which is why the tool focuses on what is still published and still useful: the registrar, the key dates, the locks, the name servers and DNSSEC. For .uk domains, Nominet can disclose registrant data through a formal process if you have a legitimate legal reason.
They're the registry's flags on the domain, and the tool translates the common ones inline. Transfer and delete locks are good news: they stop the domain being moved or dropped without authorisation. The ones to act on are redemptionPeriod and pendingDelete, which mean a domain has expired and is heading for release. If you see those on your own domain, renew it immediately.
Four things, in order. That expiry is comfortably in the future with auto-renew on and a current payment card behind it. That the transfer lock is on. That you know who controls the registrar account and the name servers, because that's effectively ownership of your website and email. And that the records themselves look intentional, with no leftovers pointing at services you stopped paying for years ago.
Yes. Domains and DNS are the quiet single point of failure in most businesses: renewals on a leaver's credit card, name servers with an agency that vanished, zones full of mystery records. We bring domains, DNS and certificates under proper management with monitoring, locks and renewals handled, as part of our managed IT support.
Not sure what you're looking at?
Send us the domain and we'll tell you what's healthy, what's risky and what's just clutter, no charge for the conversation.