DomainTools

I use DomainTools daily for Whois lookups and for historical Whois searches to find domain owners. In November of 2013, the DomainTools website saw a significant redesign, and in January of this year, the company redesigned its Whois history tool.

This evening, DomainTools sent an email to its members announcing “a major overhaul of the Whois results page.” I received the email just a few moments ago, and I haven’t had a chance to go through the changes yet. I use DomainTools many times a day, and I am sure this is going to take some time to get accustomed to the new website.

Because there are many people in the business who use DomainTools but may not have a membership, I am taking the liberty to share the email content with you so you can see what has changed. If you have any feedback for the DomainTools team, you are welcome to share it here or directly with the company.

DomainTools Redesign Announcement:

I don’t hand register many domain names anymore. I tend to focus my time on finding great domain names that are coming up for auction and making inquiries on domain names that are privately owned.

When I am looking to buy domain names in a certain niche, I like to use DomainTools to do my Whois searches. It’s easy to see who owns a domain name, and the history tool allows me to see the provenance of the domain name. It’s especially valuable when a domain name is privately owned, and I can see an email address that was previously used.

On occasion, I will find an unregistered domain name that I expected to see registered. This is a score for me because if I was looking it up to buy privately, I would certainly value it at more than the registration fee. When a domain name is unregistered, this is the image that is shown on DomainTools. I love seeing this graphic because it usually means I can hand register a domain name I may have bought privately.

Seeing this graphic doesn’t always mean the domain name is available to register, but I’ve found that more often than not, it indicates an unregistered domain name. I love seeing this graphic, and I think it is probably my favorite domain graphic!

DomainTools sent a reminder to its customers today urging them to change their user password because of the Heartbleed bug that has the potential to impact a huge amount of websites. Here’s part of the message I received from DomainTools this afternoon:

“On Monday April 7th, news broke on the Heartbleed bug vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library and the risk to users’ accounts. This has widespread implications as OpenSSL is used by roughly two-thirds of all websites on the Internet and this vulnerability could expose a user’s login and password to hackers.

As soon as we learned of Heartbleed on Monday we started taking steps to remove the vulnerability. These steps started Monday night and have been completed. Now that new SSL certificates are installed on all of our services, all DomainTools users will be logged out and forced to change their passwords to ensure there is no lingering exposure to Heartbleed. This needs to be done to ensure the security of our users’ accounts and login credentials.”

Although DomainTools is