I noticed that the Whoisology.com domain name changed registrants to the Escrow.com escrow account. I reached out to Whoisology co-founder Ryan McKegney, and he confirmed that his company sold the Whoisology business to WhoisXML API earlier this year. “We were looking to focus on DomainAgents and since WhoisXML was already a Whoisology partner with deep expertise in the whois data and internet security field, we felt they were a very natural fit who could do interesting things with the site,” he told me.
The transaction price was not disclosed to me by either party, but the entire Whoisology business was sold.
Whoisology is a business that provides a number of services related to domain name Whois records. Users can perform reverse Whois searches via Whoisology to link various domain names to a particular registrant. The business also has archived historical Whois records as well. Whoisology can be helpful to domain investors as well as people tasked with investigating Whois records (private investigators, brand management firms, lawyers, police organizations…etc).
I reached out to WhoisXML API seeking a comment, and a representative from the company shared the following with me:
“We plan to continue grow whoisology.com to meet the demand from domain industry on domain research & domaining and cybercrime investigation.
we offer a free media account to all journalists. We plan to offer connected domains api and reverse whois api from whoisology. we also offer Bulk Domain Search.”
During the past couple of months, getting Whois records has been much more difficult in light of Europe’s GDPR. Under the GDPR regulations, many domain registrars display something similar to “Data Protected” to people performing a Whois lookup. This has made it more challenging to know the registrant of a particular domain name. Services like Whoisology can assist domain investors, investigators, and others who need to find the registrant of a domain name. It looks like the buyer of Whoisology plans to continue to offer these services and connect them to their own services.
