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.

Tags: domains, domaintools, free, redesign, registrar, whois, whois.sc