Daniel - July 8, 2021
How To Scrape Data From Whois
In this article, we’ll be looking at how to scrape data from Whois.
About Whois
Whois is an online protocol and service for identifying domains/websites. Every website domain on the internet is registered by someone, to a particular registrar, in a particular country, and has a specific IP address. These are the details that identifies the domains hence these are what you get when you perform a Whois lookup.
There are so many Whois lookup platforms on the internet. To make use of them, you just need to enter the website’s URL. The service is always free and anyone can look up the Whois data of any website. When you perform a Whois lookup, the information you get include;
Domain Information
Find the perfect Proxy Product.
Domain name
Registrar
Registration date
Expiration date
Updated date
Name servers
Domain status
Registrar Information
Registrar name
Organization
Address
Postal Code
Country
Phone number
Email address
These are the two main information categories you get. The others include the Administrative and Technical contact which, most of the time, are the same as the Registrar information. There’s also the Raw Whois Data where you get more information like the ICANN URL, DNSSEC, etc.
Since anyone can look up the Whois data of any website, most website owners mask their Whois data via their registrar.
How To Scrape Whois Data
You might need to analyze the domain and registrar information of many websites. Looking up their Whois Data one after the other can be a very time-taking task. You can make light of it using a web scraping bot. The bot will automatically extract all the data you need.
The problem with using a bot is that most websites are against it. Whois lookup sites don’t allow users to access their database using automated means. Hence, if you attempt scraping Whois data from a lookup site, you will be blocked. The site can blacklist your IP address and you won’t be able to access it anymore.
The website will detect your bot because your IP address will send so many requests. This means that if you send your requests from different IPs, your bot will not be detected. This is why using a proxy is important when scraping data. Not just from the Whois website but any website.
With a proxy, your real IP address is hidden as you scrape. In replace of your real IP address, you get many other IP addresses to use. You can scrape safely by rotating the IPs so none gets detected for automated behavior.
Best Proxies For Scraping Whois
Proxies are different in how they are used and where they get their IP address from. In the first category, we have shared, semi-shared, and private/dedicated proxies. In the second category, we have residential and datacenter proxies.
Concerning how they’re used, private proxies are always the best because you’re not sharing your IPs with anyone. On the IP address source, residential proxies are ideal as they are not easily detected. Datacenter proxies are great for web scraping too thanks to their speed.
Well, what matters most is the proxy provider you use. A reliable proxy provider you should use is ProxyRack. With ProxyRack, you have the option to process your web scraping requests using an API which makes things a lot easier.
Furthermore, the service provides more than 5 million residential IP addresses and more than 20,000 datacenter IPs. Check out the proxies below:
Residential Proxies
Unmetered Residential Proxies: Starting from $80
Premium GEO Residential Proxies: Starting from $14.95
Private Residential Proxies: Starting from $99.95
Datacenter Proxies
USA Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Mixed Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Shared Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $49
Canada Rotating Proxies: Starting at $65
Bottom Line
Hope you now know how to scrape data from Whois?
Whois data gives you access to the domain and registrar information of websites. You can scrape such data using a proxy and a web scraping bot.
