Domain WHOIS & DNS Lookup — bulk domain checker with registrar, expiry and DNS records

For anyone who has to check many domains at once and is tired of pasting them one by one into a whois site: domain investors and brokers, agencies and IT teams that manage client domains, security and brand-protection teams, and SEO people vetting expired or competitor domains. Give this Actor a list of domains (or a dataset) and get one clean row per domain: registrar, created / updated / expiry dates, days to expiry, status, nameservers and A / MX / NS records. $0.50 per 1,000 domains. It uses RDAP (the modern replacement for port-43 WHOIS, from the IANA bootstrap) and DNS over HTTPS (Cloudflare or Google). No scraping, no proxies, no API keys.

What it does

• WHOIS data via RDAP: registrar and its IANA ID, creation date, last-changed date, expiration date, days to expiry, expired flag, domain status codes (client transfer prohibited, …), nameservers, DNSSEC flag
• DNS records via DNS over HTTPS: A (IPv4), MX (with priority) and NS records, from Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google Public DNS
• Registered or not: unregistered names come back as not_registered (and are free), so you can screen a list of names
• Messy input is fine: https://WWW.Example.com/page?x=1 becomes www.example.com, internationalized names become punycode, duplicates are removed, typos come back as invalid rows (free)
• TLDs without RDAP (several country domains): the row is built from DNS and marked dns_only
• Polite and robust: per-server connection and spacing limits, timeouts, up to 3 retries with backoff (honours Retry-After), one failing domain never stops the run

Privacy: no personal data

Registrant, administrative, technical and billing contacts are never read or output — no names, e-mails, phone numbers or addresses. Only the registrar (a company), dates, statuses and nameserver names are used. Every row carries registrantRedacted: true. E-mail addresses typed into the input are rejected as invalid, not looked up. (Many registries redact registrant data anyway since GDPR; this Actor does not depend on that.)

Input example

{
  "domains": ["example.com", "python.org", "https://www.apify.com/store"],
  "includeDns": true,
  "dnsResolver": "cloudflare",
  "concurrency": 5
}

Or point it at a dataset of another Actor with datasetId and domainField. Empty input runs a free demo on four domains (not charged, rows carry _demo: true).

Output

One row per domain in the dataset (a table view for registration data and one for DNS records are included):

{
  "domain": "example.com",
  "status": "ok",
  "registered": true,
  "registrar": "Example Registrar, Inc.",
  "registrarIanaId": "9999",
  "createdAt": "2001-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "expiresAt": "2027-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "daysToExpiry": 100,
  "expired": false,
  "domainStatus": ["client transfer prohibited"],
  "nameservers": ["ns1.example.net", "ns2.example.net"],
  "dnssecSigned": false,
  "dnsA": ["192.0.2.1"],
  "dnsMx": ["10 mail.example.com"],
  "dnsNs": ["ns1.example.net", "ns2.example.net"],
  "rdapServer": "rdap.example-registry.test",
  "rdapDomain": "example.com",
  "registrantRedacted": true,
  "error": null,
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-21T09:00:00Z"
}

(Made-up placeholder values that show the shape of a row.) status is one of:

status	meaning	charged
ok	RDAP registration data returned	yes
dns_only	the TLD has no RDAP service; DNS records returned	yes
not_registered	the registry says the name is not registered	no
partial	RDAP failed (see error) but DNS answered	no
invalid	not a valid domain name	no
error	the lookup failed (timeout, rate limit, server error; see error)	no

The record SUMMARY in the key-value store counts each status and the number of charged domains.

Use cases

• Watch a portfolio of client or brand domains for upcoming expiry (daysToExpiry below 30)
• Screen thousands of candidate names: which are registered, since when, with which registrar
• Find which domains still point to old nameservers or mail servers before a migration
• Enrich a list of domains from another scraper with registrar, age and DNS data

Limits (cannot be raised by input)

• 50,000 domains per run; up to 10 in parallel; at most 2 connections to one server at a time, at least 0.2 s between requests to the same server
• Each request has a timeout (default 15 s, max 60 s) and is retried at most 3 times
• RDAP data comes from the registry or registrar of each TLD and can differ slightly between them (some omit the updated date, for example). Servers may answer with rate limits under heavy load; those domains come back as error and are not charged, so you can run them again
• Expiry dates are the registry's; a domain in a grace period can show a past date (expired: true)

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.0005 per domain looked up ($0.50 per 1,000). Unregistered, invalid, partial and failed lookups are free. Set a maximum charge per run to cap spend; the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

FAQ

Is this the same as WHOIS? It returns the same kind of registration data, through RDAP, the protocol ICANN requires registries and registrars to run. It does not connect to port-43 WHOIS servers. Why is there no owner name? By design (see Privacy). The Actor is for domain status, expiry and DNS checks, not for finding people. Why dns_only for some domains? A few country TLDs publish no RDAP service. You still get the DNS records and a registered flag. Can I check subdomains? Yes. DNS records are those of the exact name you give. Registration data belongs to the registered domain, so for www.example.com the Actor looks up example.com and shows it in rdapDomain. (It has no public-suffix list: for names under multi-part suffixes such as co.uk, give the registered domain itself.)

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