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I have heard stories of people searching for domain name availability through other registrars' web sites, only to find that a domain that showed up as available when they first searched was suddenly registered by someone else the next day. Many registrars or other third parties have been accused of "spying" on these searches and either registering the names themselves or selling the data.

Does Dynadot monitor domain availability searches on its site in any manner? Or, can I rest assured that no one is spying on my searches, provided that I have the "secure" mode turned on while searching?

I have been almost a year with Dynadot and never faced this kind of problem. Even once I searched a domain for two to three days (before I get some funds in my account) that domain was available and I successfully resisted

There is an alternative: just query the central registry's whois server directly to see if a domain name is in use.

*nix users have a Whois client included with the OS, which allows command-line enquiries like « whois example.com »

Windows users aren't quite as fortunate, but utilities such as http://www.softnik.com/download 's "Domain Name Analyser" can be downloaded and used for free.

Depending which top-level domain you're looking for, the domain registry (not just the registrar) may also offer a web-based 'whois'. For instance, .org's central registry is http://pir.org/Search/WhoisSearchResults.aspx and .info is http://www.afilias.info/whois_search

For individual country codes, often a country code .xx will have nic.xx (or some variant such as register.xx) as the central registry's site. The master list of individual country-code registries is on http://www.iana.org/root-whois


[This post has been edited by c_a_b_kingston_ca on Aug 11, 2007 2:38pm.]


[This post has been edited by c_a_b_kingston_ca on Aug 11, 2007 2:41pm.]

We not not save or monitor searches at all. We don't sell search data to others, or use it ourselves.

Your searches exist only in the memory of our servers. We never log or save the searches to a file or database.

Excellent. Thanks for the replies and I'm glad to hear that Dynadot's policy is to not monitor domain searches.