Registrars and WHOIS Records

What is a Registrar?

The most basic definition of this word is a company that sells Domain names, so if you wanted to buy lookatmydomain.com you would have to talk to a registrar.

This barely scratches the surface however. A detailed look into what a registrar does shows that they must register, manage, and keep track of there domain names.To do this they must first be authorized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to register domains with a certain country code and Top Level Domain

The most important aspect of a registrar is the WHOIS record. A WHOIS record is what the world first sees when someone tries to view lookatmydomain.com. In a WHOIS record there is a lot of information such as an Administrative / Technical Contact which can be useful for many users, but the most critical piece of information in a WHOIS record are the Domain Name Servers (DNS) it points your website to. If the DNS is incorrect and Johnny goes to view lookatmydomain.com, he is not going to see anything other then a page cannot be displayed.

Here is an example of a WHOIS Record:

 Domain Name: FRII.COM
 Registrar: TUCOWS, INC.
 Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
 Referral URL: http://www.opensrs.org
 Name Server: NS2.FRII.NET
 Name Server: NS2.WINTERLAN.COM
 Name Server: NS1.FRII.NET
 Updated Date: 29-jul-2002

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .ORG, .EDU domains and Registrars.

Registrant:
Front Range Internet, Inc.
213 Linden Street
Suite 200
Fort Collins, CO 80524
US

Domain Name: FRII.COM

Administrative Contact:
    Hostmaster, FRII  hostmaster@frii.com
    213 Linden Street
    Suite 200
    Fort Collins, CO 80524
    US
    970-212-0700
    Fax: 970-224-3883

 Technical Contact:
    Hostmaster, FRII  hostmaster@frii.com
    213 Linden Street
    Suite 200
    Fort Collins, CO 80524
    US
    970-212-0700
    Fax: 970-224-3883



Registration Service Provider:
  Front Range Internet, Inc., hostmaster@frii.net
  +1.9702120700


Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 29-Jul-2002.
Record expires on 17-Oct-2004.
Record Created on 18-Oct-1995.

Domain servers in listed order:
  NS1.FRII.NET   216.17.128.1
    NS2.FRII.NET   216.17.128.2
  NS2.WINTERLAN.COM   209.150.160.40

Next week I will talk about how DNS and hosting work together to get your web page available to the world!

Justin Botelho and Casey Kramer