Blacknight WHOIS Server

Notes for Registrars

If a current customer of ours is intending on transferring a domain from our accreditation to yours, you may need to query our WHOIS server for contact details. Here we outline how to do this, how to parse contact information from our WHOIS server, what to do if you hit query limits, and what to do if you find you are unable to connect to our WHOIS server.

Querying our WHOIS server

Our WHOIS server runs on whois.blacknight.com. If you run a POSIX-compatible system such as Linux, *BSD, Solaris, or MacOS, you can query it from the command line as follows:

$ whois -h whois.blacknight.com example.com

Parsing our WHOIS output

We have gone to great lengths to ensure our WHOIS server’s output is easily readable by both humans and computers. Our WHOIS server uses a key/value pair format commonly used by other registrars, where the first part of the key is they contact type—i.e., owner, admin, tech, and billing—and the second part is the field name—i.e., contact-id, name, organisation, email, voice, fax, addr (of which there may be more than one), city, province (that is, the county, land, state, &c.), postcode, and country (the ISO 3166 two-letter country code)—, separated from each other with a hyphen. The key is separated from the value by a colon. You should trim any leading or trailing whitespace from the values. Excepting the order of addr lines, neither the order of the pairs nor the presence of blank lines are significant and purely documentary lines start with a semicolon. Here is an example:

owner-contact-id: 42
owner-name: John Doe
owner-organisation: Yoyodyne Heavy Industries
owner-email: jd@example.com
owner-voice: +0.000000000000
owner-fax: +0.000000000000
owner-addr: Office 15, Imaginary Plaza
owner-addr: 1 Infinite Loop
owner-city: Townsville
owner-province: Grand Fenwick
owner-postcode: P05T C0DE
owner-country: ZZ

For a real-life example, see the whois output for blacknight.com.

Query limits

Please see our notes on query limits if you are having difficulty querying our WHOIS server.

Failed queries

Very occasionally, our WHOIS server may be momentarily down due to an upgrade in progress and your connection may be refused. If this is so, please five minutes to retry your query.