Domain Tools has been an absolutely indispensable tool for my business, and while I do use it as my WHOIS service that’s only a fraction of what I use the platform for. I was talking with a friend earlier this week who is starting to get into Domaining. He was asking me about Domain Monitoring tools and ways he could automate some of the things he found himself doing manually.
When I first started my business back in 2007 I didn’t know anything about DomainTools. In fact it took about a year until I discovered the tool and everything that I could do with it. Here’s a great example, there have always been particular domains that I have my eye on to either buy, or potentially even get lucky and catch on a drop. These may have been names I’ve put offers in on before and haven’t heard back or domains that the owner wasn’t using but just didn’t want to sell.
Before I used DomainTools this meant manually doing WHOIS lookups on these domain names to see if they had been renewed or transferred. As my list grew, as did the time spent monitoring. Sure, it did work-out, there was one time in fact a domain I had really wanted changed hands and I was able to buy it from the new owner. This can happen more than you would think. You put an offer in on a domain, the owner says they don’t want to sell, keep upping your offer, still no interset, then you find-out a year later it was sold to someone three months after you placed an offer. Unless you’re constantly monitoring the WHOIS information, you’d never know this!
By using the Domain Monitor in DomainTools I was able to setup alerts and get instant notification anytime the WHOIS information changes on a specific domain. I also use this service to monitor some of my top domains to make sure nothing suspicious is going on. This is a nice security measure an only takes a minute to setup, once the alerts are in, you never have to check this manually again.
Along with great monitoring tools I also use DomainTool’s research tools before buying a domain name. The WHOIS History is probably the research tool I use myself. This is very useful when buying an expired domain name in particular so you can better understand who owned the domain before you. One expired domain I was looking at last year looked like a great deal, I then looked at the WHOIS history and found that the name was previously owned by a company that had been scamming people on the Internet for years. Doing a Google search for the name didn’t reveal this, but the WHOIS history showed that owning this domain could be much more of a curse than a blessing.
So if you’ve just been using DomainTools for WHOIS, you might be missing-out. There’s a lot to the DomainTools platform, it can save you an incredible amount of time while allowing you to go a step further when researching a potential purchase. Of course their WHOIS service is the best-of-the-best, but that goes without saying, it’s all the other tools under the hood that make DomainTools a must for every serious domain investor.
