8

As far as I know the two publicly available whois servers for .com and .net domains are:

whois.verisign-grs.com

and 

whois.crsnic.net

Questions:

  1. Are there others I missed?
  2. Does anyone know the limit of queries you can send to them from the same IP (e.g., per day, week or month)?
Daniel Scocco
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  • if you can make due with what GoogleDNS knows, 8.8.8.8 allows over 450 requests per second for well over an hour with no problems.. and i did over 2 million requests at little over an hour, still no problems with googledns. – hanshenrik Dec 04 '17 at 13:21
  • (and there i was doing up to 1000 simultaneous requests, but due to response times, network latency, bw, etc, it wound up at about 450 requests completed per second, with a 1Gbps connection) – hanshenrik Dec 05 '17 at 10:53
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    @hanshenrik Are you confusing WHOIS for DNS? 8.8.8.8 offers DNS service, not WHOIS AFAIK. Testing with `whois -h 8.8.8.8 example.com` times out for me, as I'd expect. – kidmose Sep 21 '18 at 11:42
  • "from the same IP" Note that it may not (shouldn't) even be rate limiting on an IP basis only, it can be as well from an IP block or even a whole AS, it is almost impossible to know precisely all the registries rules on rate limiting. Also note that at least in gTLDs, whois servers have to be reachable over IPv6 as well, and hence you can also have different rules on rate limiting there (network blocks will be sized differently between IPv4 and IPv6) – Patrick Mevzek Jan 15 '20 at 17:35

2 Answers2

7

whois.verisign-grs.com and whois.crsnic.net points to the same WHOIS interface.

Here's the result of a dig query request.

;; ANSWER SECTION:
whois.crsnic.net.   1   IN  A   199.7.59.74

;; ANSWER SECTION:
whois.verisign-grs.com. 1   IN  A   199.7.59.74

According to the IANA database, the authoritative URL is whois.verisign-grs.com. However, I confirm the old one is still working.

Changing the URL doesn't give you more flexibility against request limits as they point to the same interface.

Verisign doesn't disclose the WHOIS limit.

Dear ...,

Thank you for contacting VeriSign.

We apologize but we are not allowed to disclose internal information. You will be notified once your IP is blocked from our Whois database.

Please know that your inquiry is important to us, and we value your business.

On some forums you can read it was around 1000 requests per day.

Simone Carletti
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0

  1. Whois servers list can be found http://www.nirsoft.net/whois_servers_list.html which provides Whois servers in format:

    • co whois.nic.co
    • com whois.verisign-grs.com
    • net whois.verisign-grs.com
    • info whois.afilias.info

Or https://raw.githubusercontent.com/whois-server-list/whois-server-list/master/whois-server-list.xml provides XML structured format with extension, server, availability pattern and other information.

  1. Depends on the server and extension.

Simone said:

On some forums you can read it was around 1000 requests per day.

You may get timeout or exception after 1000 requests if they are done very quickly but after retry a server should process them. It should not be a problem to query 1 million .com less in a half day, but you will stuck with 1 million .info domain name queries.

Justas
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  • First URL says ";Last updated on 16/02/2016" so I wouldn't trust its content. It also have very little number of entries, and only a few gTLDs. The second one says "2017-01-20T17:21:12.659+01:00" so it doesn't not seem to be kept up to data any better. Collecting at some point in time the list of whois servers is an easy task. Maintaining that list in the long run, is the hard part of it. – Patrick Mevzek Jan 15 '20 at 17:33