How do you view domain whois history?

Question

I know its possible to view the current whois information on a domain by doing:

• whois example.com

However this is not what I need, I need to view the history of WHOIS for previous owners and other information.

• Can you view WHOIS history? if so, how?

Solution 1

Domain Tools offer a whois history service and their records go back to the year 2000. I've never found another working whois history service (paid or free), and I've spent a while looking.

Solution 2

I'd suggest looking at the Wayback Machine. It stores old copies of many websites and if the domain you're interested in was archived there may be a contact page or headers telling you who owned or developed the site during a particular period.

Solution 3

You can try Whois History API The API/service allows you to view domains ownership information from the past 10 years, backed by 10 billion whois records, 300+ million active domains, 1 billion historic domains with thousands of tlds tracked.

Solution 4

One off? Or in some sort of app?

Just search for domain whois, I use this website, just put the domain in: http://whois.domaintools.com/

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Comments

[Mark Stosberg]

This service doesn't show the /historical/ information he's looking for, only the current. They have a separate paid service for the historical data, which is linked above.

[Kell]

I award a 50 point bounty if you answer this question. Do you know any that go back further? Alternatively is there a way to contact the registrar?

[Nick]

@William don't know any that go back beyond 2000. A Whois lookup should show registrar information, which usually includes a URL or email where you can contact the registrar, for example: whois.domaintools.com/google.com. However, registrars do not generally share data about their customers or former customers.