Domain API for whois and bulk lookups?

I'm looking for an API for bulk lookups

[cgikira]

I run a website that creates potential domain names (by combining words ). Right now I'm bouncing the "check availability" function over to dotster, but would like to move the lookups in-house to keep folks on my site and allow them some more options.

I've been searching for a domain API that would let me do bulk lookups (and ideally also whois). Dotster supposedly has one but offers no support for it and I haven't been able to get it to work. I did take a look at enom's reseller API - thought it was kinda expensive though, and in running some tests I found it inaccurate. I'm also considering opensrs, but in reviewing the docco it doesn't seem they support bulk searches.

Does anyone know of any other API's? It needs to be inexpensive or free - my site does thousands of lookups per day. Maybe on the order of 50-100K lookups.

Thanks!

[terrellm]

There are two types of lookups: a basic availability check and a detailed whois that includes registrant information. Performing too many of the detailed whois checks from the same IP will get you banned by the name server. However, there is no limit that I'm aware of for basic availability checks.

You can find some PHP sample code at [dnmedia.com...] which shows how to perform the availability check.

[cgikira]

Thanks for the link. I don't think this is really what I want though - I need an API service that will let me query upwards of a million domain names per day. The whois-servers.net service works one domain at a time.

There's a comment on the article you linked saying how most registrars have an API for bulk domain checking, however I can't find ANY registrar that offers this. I checked enom, which does have an API (but no public docco on it); after getting access to a test account I found that they also don't support checking more than one domain at a time. Dotster supposedly has an API but I haven't been able to get it to work, and they offer no support for it at all.

Isn't there *any* registrar that offers a bulk lookup API?

How the heck do the registrars themselves manage bulk lookups? I imagine they can query their own database easily enough, but what about for domains owned by different registrars?

[Webwork]

For future reference, please get permission to post the actual code in this forum.

As a general rule we don't allow offsite links, especially "to answers", since the offsite pages can change, domains can be dropped, servers can be down, etc. We also have this policy against offsite links to deter promotional posts/threads.

This is a "one off", allowed since you're a bit new to the place and it's an interesting topic. ;)

[edited by: Webwork at 12:39 pm (utc) on May 6, 2009]