Filed under: Internet, Web services
Whois.sc becomes DomainTools.com
I do a lot of
domain name lookups, some for actual business or research reasons, many just out of curiosity. For quite awhile I used
Whois.sc because it was handy: you could type in whois.sc/example.com in
any browser's address bar to go straight to the WHOIS record without any fuss (no EULAs, TOSes, CAPTCHAs, or logins),
and it had some other nice features like looking up .com/net/org/us/etc. domain names at the same time and prominently
displaying expiration dates. Yesterday, however, I did a domain lookup in the usual way and found something completely
new: DomainTools.com. For a second I feared the worst—that Whois.sc had
been bought out by some company that was going to rain on my parade—but as it turns out, Whois.sc just got
rebranded and retooled, and, believe it or not, it's better than ever. The page layout is much improved, the thumbnail
images are much bigger and, perhaps best of all, the whois.sc/example.com shortcut still works (and DomainTools assures
us that it will stay in operation indefinitely. Unfortunately, some of Whois.sc/DomainTools' services, like reverse
lookups and domain histories still require (free) membership, but it always makes me happy when a free service changes
and it turns out to be for the better.
After spending the better part of an hour on 