Domain availability API ?

[Mr.Domains]

This might be a niave question, but is there some way to bulk check the availabilty of domains by API, without shelling out cash?

I am building a tool, and I want it to be able to check whether domains are available, on the fly.

I know that Dynadot have a free API, but that only works from 1 specified IP address, so no good for an online tool, (presumably?).

What about calling the results from a whois site, like:

http://whois.domaintools.com/domain.com ?

Presumably they would block your site after n connections, but is this doable using proxy servers, etc?

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Thank you.

[catchmesleeping]

There are a few ways of doing this. Two legit ways are using an API or using the 'whois' linux command line tool.

DynaDot recently made their API FREE! Before they had a requirement to add $500 to your account before you could access it. The only problem now that it's free is that ... it doesn't work anymore :( Hopefully they'll get that problem figured out

Also, you can easily install a program on a linux server called 'whois' or 'jwhois'. If you're on centos, you can install like this:

yum -y install jwhois

You could easily check a few thousand names a day with this tool - however they do have limits... the most annoying of which are .ORGs, where are limited to 4 lookups per minute.

But overall, jwhois is great, because they give you the creation date, expire date, nameservers, etc, so you can really get some more information about the domain names. And if you're smart, you can save that in a database like a cache, so you don't need to lookup the domain name for availability again, until after the expired date.

How many lookups are you trying to do? There are some other techniques that I would describe as 'gray hat', that I won't post here in a public forum

[katherine]

You can add up to 5 IP addresses for use with the Dynadot API.

[Acro]

DRT - Domain Research Tool. Not free but it pays back its price. http://www.domainresearchtool.com/

[DropWizard.com]

I've used domain name analyzer for years (free). You can set intervals and # of connections. It's probably suitable if you're only looking up a few hundred every day. There is no option for proxy on my version but there is an updated version I don't have.

http://www.domainpunch.com/domain-name-analyzer/

[haodomains]

WhoisSmart.com is a good tool for domain search: http://www.whoissmart.com