Suppose the domain name you have chosen has already been taken. Now what will you do? You may either keep searching for a name that is not yet taken, or contact the owner of the domain name and want to purchase it. Before negotiating with the owner, visit the domain name you want and check if it is active. Some owners prefer to sell the name if they are not using it at all. Some others buy domain names for selling them for a large price in the future. Be careful not to overpay for your domain name. You can obtain the contact information for domain name owners from the domain name research sites. Network Solutions, a foundational registrar for .com and .net, offers a simple WhoIs query function that may suffice. It, however, is limited to searching by the exact domain name or by NIC handle, customarily the owner's initials followed by a number. Register.com has a WhoIs search function on most of its pages that check a domain name with or without specifying the extension simultaneously across a range of popular extensions and some country codes. In addition, it suggests some available name variants in case your searched name has already been taken. Allwhois.com, BetterWhois.com, TrueWhois, Whois Source and WhoIsQuery.com are also useful as each of them can access various registrars' WhoIs databases that contain many country domain registrars. These sites also have a variety of unique search capabilities, and sometimes can provide a fuller and more accurate response for exact matches of partial or full domain names. AMNESI can reveal a range of similar names that can be utilized for identifying misspelled or similar versions of a name. Whois.net is capable of searching a database of deleted names using your name fragments. That can be extremely useful in discovering what someone else thought was a worthwhile name previously but which is now available again. |
