WAP Domains

Written in 2012, revised more times than we can count, most recently in March 2026. If you're new to domains, read this top to bottom. If you've been around: the drops section is the one people keep linking to, and it's the one we keep having to fix.

What is WHOIS?

WHOIS is the lookup protocol that answers "who is behind this domain?" — sort of. When you query a WHOIS server (or more likely these days, a web form that queries it for you), you get back some or all of the following:

• Registrant — the person or organization the domain belongs to (name, organization, address, email, phone)
• Registrar — the company the domain was bought through, plus their IANA ID
• Dates — creation, last update, and expiry. Old-timers: yes, these are less reliable post-2018, see below
• Nameservers — where the domain's DNS lives
• Status codes — the EPP states like ok, clientTransferProhibited, pendingDelete. These matter more than most beginners realize

Since GDPR (2018) and the wave of privacy laws after it, most registrants are redacted by default — you'll see "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY" where a person's name used to be. This broke half the industry's tooling, and honestly it's why our WHOIS tools category shrank. What still works reliably: registrar identity, dates, status codes, and nameservers. What mostly doesn't: finding out who owns that domain you want to buy, unless they left a contact form or the domain has a buy-service link.

A tip that's aged well: check the creation date against the registrar. A domain "created 1997" but registered at a registrar known for drop-catching might have expired and been re-caught in '97 — same name, different ownership. WHOIS history tools (see the directory) show you the gaps.

Appraising Domains

Everyone wants a number, so here's the honest hierarchy of where numbers come from, best to worst:

• Comparable sales. Recent public sales of similar length/extension/category. The only evidence that means much of anything.
• Category rules of thumb. One-word .com > two word .com > everything else, roughly, with a thousand exceptions (see our July 2026 news item about the one-word .co that beat our estimate 4x. Still not over it.)
• Automated appraisals. An algorithm that has never paid money for a domain in its life. Useful as a sanity check on relative value between your own names; dangerous as an expectation.
• "I feel like it's worth..." The owner's opinion. Statistically the least accurate figure in the entire industry. We say that with love, we are also owners.

Factors that actually move price: length, memorability, extension, brandability, existing traffic or type-in behavior, prior use, and whether there's an end user desperate for it this specific month. The last one is why the same domain can be worth $800 one year and $28,000 two years later without anything about the domain itself changing.

Expiry & Drops — the Timeline

The single most-linked thing we've ever written. Here's the life of an expired domain, roughly, for .com and most gTLDs (ccTLDs are all different, always check the registry):

Drop-catching services ("backorders") all compete at the moment of release; the winner gets the domain, usually by having the best technical position, not the best price for you. Our advice hasn't changed since 2013: if you actually want the name, backorder it at more than one service and set a ceiling on what you'd pay before the adrenaline starts.

One more thing, because it bites people every single year: a domain sitting in "redemption" is not yet expired-forever. We get several emails a month from folks who watched their domain "drop" on a checker while it was still in redemption and they could have saved it for the fee. Read the status code before you panic.

Reading List

The WHOIS section has since grown into a full WHOIS guide, the drops timeline into its own drop cycle page, and the tools worth bookmarking into a hand-curated tools list. For anything else — marketplaces, escrow, ccTLD registry rules — see the directory. For news that happened this month, the headlines page. For corrections to this guide, the contact page — the editor's inbox is open and has been for fifteen years.