FAQ

This data feed subscription is licensed to you or your organization only, you may not resell or relicense the data without explicit written permission from Whois API, Inc. Any violation will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Data definition

WHOIS Database 2.0 is a full snapshot of the WHOIS records we hold: every record we collected in the 365 days before the export date, one record per domain (the latest one). A release holds about 470 million records across ~1,370 generic and country-code TLDs.

Records that failed validation (no WHOIS text, "not found" or rate-limit replies, invalid domain or bare IP address) are excluded, so every record has a syntactically valid domain name and a real WHOIS response. Contact fields hold whatever the registrar publishes: for most generic TLDs that is a privacy or redaction placeholder rather than personal data.

The database comes in the following forms

How often is the database updated?

• Monthly database: a new release folder monthly/%YYYY-MM%/ appears at the beginning of each month.
• Quarterly database: a new version folder v%N% appears once a quarter.

Each release is a full snapshot, not a delta. Load it in full, or compare two releases on domainName if you need the changes.

What do the dates mean?

• monthly/%YYYY-MM% in the folder name is the release month, when the folder was published.
• %DATE% in file names (e.g. 2026-11-02) is the export date, the day the snapshot was taken. The snapshot contains every record whose collection date (audit.createdDate) falls in the 365 days ending on that date.

Which variant should I download?

• full if you parse WHOIS yourself or need the original registry and registrar responses.
• regular if you want every parsed field without the bulky raw text.
• simple if you need a compact table: domain, registrar, dates, status, name servers, registrant and administrative contacts.

All variants hold the same records in the same parts, so you only need one. The CSV variants use exactly the column sets of the previous product generation, so existing loaders work unchanged.

Statistics

• Release: 2026-11 (export 2026-11-02)
• Records: 470.3M (gTLD 319.1M, ccTLD 151.2M)

How do I get the files?

Over HTTPS, FTP or FTPS with your API key; see Access to database files.

Support

Questions about the files: [email protected]. Please mention "WHOIS Database 2.0", the release month, the variant and the file name.