How to Scrape Whois Domain Data Efficiently

As you probably know, every domain you ever encountered while surfing the web is registered and paid for by its owner. When someone wants to register a domain or a domain name, they need to provide their name, email address, physical address, and phone number.

When you purchase a domain, you can pay for privacy protection to ensure all this information remains hidden from the public. The privacy protection plan usually costs about $1 per month and offers a great way to keep your information hidden from the public. This article will help you gather data about people who decided not to use privacy protection and why proxies are essential for this procedure.

Scrape Whois Domain Data Anonymously With Proxies

You might wonder where you can get the data for a specific domain. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) is the first place to check. This nonprofit organization handles the coordination and maintenance of several databases covering the internet’s core infrastructure, including the domain name system.

The ICAAN is an excellent destination if you need information on a single domain . However, it’s not particularly useful if you want to gather data on a large number of domains. You might want to check for new domains and offer your website development services. Maybe you’re looking for companies in your niche market. There’s also a chance you want to put together your own database with details about domain registrants. Whatever the case, scraping is the answer.

Why Are Proxies Necessary for Successful Web Scraping

Gathering large amounts of data efficiently from any source is impossible without reliable proxy servers. Proxies offer two key advantages in this scenario:

• They keep your activity private, so nobody can trace it back to you
• They allow you to use bots and automate the web scraping process

While gathering publicly available data is legal, scraping is generally frowned upon. Proxy servers provide the anonymity necessary for these tasks, so you don’t have to worry about geo-restrictions, bans, blocks, and other limitations.

On top of that, sending every request through a different proxy means each one comes from a different IP address in a different location. Since there’s no way to connect these requests back to you or with each other, you can use an automated solution to scrape Whois domain data faster. We’ll use ScrapeBox since it’s a practical solution you can use without coding or creating custom scripts.

Scraping Whois Data With ScrapeBox

If you’ve ever dealt with web scraping, you’ve probably heard of ScrapeBox and know what it can do. For those who don’t, it’s the all-in-one solution for gathering all sorts of online data. For a one-time fee of $97, you get the “Swiss army knife of SEO,” as the users call it. ScrapeBox offers stellar support, tutorials, and free plugins to make your scraping activities effortless.

Once you buy ScrapeBox, all you need to do is run it and check the AddOns drop-down menu. You’ll find the ScrapeBox Whois Scraper in the list. Click on Add and wait until the installation is complete. Head back to the AddOns drop-down menu, and the Whois Scraper add-on will appear there.

Clicking on it will open up a new window. This is the portal for finding the Whois data for the domains you’re interested in. To start, you’ll need a list of domains you want to scrape. You can get them from the ScrapeBox harvester or load a list from a file. You can also use the Domain Availability Checker, which is another ScrapeBox add-on. It allows you to generate a list of available or reserved domains by using keywords.

Once you have a list of domains you’re interested in, paste the URLs and click Start . ScrapeBox will start working, and you’ll get your data once it’s done. You can export this data as a .xlsx file with the domain name, registration date, expiry date, registrant’s name, email, and phone number (if available). You can also export just the names, emails, or phone numbers.

What Are the Best Proxies for Scraping Whois Domain Data?

If you just need information for a single domain, checking the ICAAN’s website with your regular IP address will work fine. However, it’s crucial to get reliable proxy servers for maximum anonymity and speed if you plan to gather a high volume of data.

If you want everything to go as smoothly as possible, don’t ping the site too often if you’re working with a small proxy pool. Rotate your proxies if possible and only run a modest number of threads at once. Most importantly, scraping Whois domain data only works with proxies that support the SOCKS protocol. Using regular HTTP/HTTPS proxies in ScrapeBox or any other solution will simply not work.

Your One-Stop Shop for Web Scraping Proxy Servers

To ensure you can scrape whois domain data smoothly, IPRoyal offers ethically-sourced residential proxy servers . Each IP comes from a genuine desktop or mobile device, so their traffic looks like any other traffic made by real internet users. With our rotating proxy options, you can get a new IP address for each request, so the number of threads isn’t an issue.

The best part? Instead of paying per proxy, you only pay for the bandwidth you need, so you can make the most of your budget!