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I'm writing a django app with a form that accepts an IP and does a whois lookup on the discovered domain names. I've found the Ubuntu package whois which I plan to call from a python subprocess, and read the stdout into a StringIO, then parse for things like Registrar, Name Servers, etc.

My question is, it seems that there are many paid whois services, which means that there must be a reason why people don't just use this Ubuntu package. I'm wondering if there's a request limit on the number of requests from a single IP to the package's whois server? I will probably be making 250 domain lookups per IP or maybe more. Also, I've found that some domains aren't searchable:

qmul.ac.uk is searchable
kat.ph is not searchable 
ahram.org.eg is not searchable

Any particular reason for that?

Sam Hammamy
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  • If you develop an app, do not call an external whois command. There is probably a library in your language that does whois queries and parsing results (where the problem is in fact). Even without that, whois is simply sending the domain name over a TCP connection on port 43 so you should do that instead of running an external command. – Patrick Mevzek Jan 15 '20 at 17:53

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The limit of the number of whois queries don't depend on the package but is a limit imposed by each single whois server.

Limits are not disclosed, so you don't actually know the number of queries you can run. Normally, you can understand you reached the limit because the single registry starts to return throttled response messages.

Simone Carletti
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