Whois API Webservice

What do you like best?

WHOISXML API's WHOIS API has been a great tool that helps my company protect its digital assets. With its wide coverage of the Internet—billions of WHOIS records; thousands of TLDs, including newly created gTLDs, and millions of domains—we get fairly accurate search results when seeking out information on our own and our clients' domains. Because its database is well-parsed and well-structured, we know we're getting WHOIS records that are consistent in formatting and so can be easily compared with one another. It makes brand protection a breeze for us with additional useful features like Brand Monitoring as well. With it, we can easily spot possible causes for concern such as copyright violators and copycats.

What do you dislike?

WHOIS API search results come in 2 download formats—JSON and CSV. We made the mistake once of choosing the JSON format and it was a little tough to read since we didn't have the proper applications. But now that we're using the CSV files instead, we're no longer having the same difficulty.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

WHOIS API is a great tool for those in the brand protection business with scalable needs. That said, if you're unsure whether the product is the right fit for you, you might want to start small and sign up for the free or one-time purchase tier—especially if you conduct queries on an irregular basis or need some time to roll out the product to a large user base. Once you have a better sense of how many credits you need monthly, you can shift to a monthly or even yearly subscription.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We initially purchased WHOIS API for our brand protection needs. We basically monitored our clients' domains with it, making sure their customers are landing on their websites and pages and not on ones that were piggybacking on their brands. We also use the brand monitoring functionality to stay updated on newly created domains.

More recently though, we found that the product had so many more practical uses like beefing up our cybersecurity and expanding our customer base. We use it to identify potential spammers and phishers and block their access to our sites and pages, in case our security solutions aren't up to speed. We also use it to find out more about our customers—where they come from and so on—that way we'll know in which areas it would be best to focus our marketing and sales efforts on. It's also a great tool when we're coming up with strategies and plans at the start of each year—helping us to prioritize projects and stay within budget. We're getting more out of the product than we initially thought.