Hosting Terms
What is WHOIS?
WHOIS in plain English — the meaning, the comparison, and why it matters to anybody running a website.
Straight answer first
WHOIS is the public lookup that records who registered a domain, which registrar it sits with, and the dates attached to it.
Below: the fuller explanation, a picture that makes it stick, why it matters in practice, and where you will actually run into it.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
0
Terms left unexplained
100+
Definitions, cross-linked
Real
Examples from real kit
Free
To read, naturally
It used to publish registrant names, addresses and email addresses wholesale, which made it a spammer's shopping list. Redaction under GDPR and the spread of privacy services now hide most personal details by default across much of the world.
The dates are what keep it useful day to day. Creation, expiry and registrar of record are the public facts that every investigation into a domain starts from.
WHOIS, by comparison
The land registry for names. Anyone may look up when a plot was registered and who handles the paperwork, though modern privacy rules keep the owner's home address off the copy handed over the counter.
Keep that picture in mind and most of the documentation you will ever read on the subject stops being mysterious.
What it means for your own site
You will use it when researching names — when a taken domain expires, who holds it — and its privacy setting decides whether your own registration doubles as a permanent public listing of your contact details.
You do not need to work at this layer every day. You need to recognise it when it explains something, which is exactly the moment this page earns its keep.
WHOIS out in the open
A founder wants a domain that somebody else already holds. WHOIS shows the expiry four months out and names the registrar, and a note goes in the calendar for the week it might drop.
Perfectly ordinary once you have seen it, which is rather the point: most hosting concepts are simple machinery wearing an intimidating name.
How this turns up in your own account
On our hosting this largely looks after itself — the platform applies sensible defaults, and the panel hands you the controls when you want them. The concepts worth reading next: Domain Privacy, Domain Registrar, Domain Name and EPP Code.
Mailboxes on your own domain are part of the plan, never an add-on sold back to you at checkout.
Why we bothered with a hundred definitions
We treat unexplained jargon as a service failure. This glossary is the support desk's accumulated translations, published where a search engine can hand them out for us.
SSL comes free with every plan and reissues itself before it lapses, so nobody has to diary the padlock.
- 100+ terms, all in plain English
- Everyday comparisons and real examples
- Related concepts linked together
- Written by the people on the desk
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
The next reads, mapped
Read on into Domain Privacy and Domain Registrar — terms rarely stand alone, so the neighbours are linked.
Honest about what to skip
Most terms are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and the glossary says which is which.
One term, fully landed
WHOIS defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.
Plain English first
Every term defined for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated rather than restated.
Linked, never siloed
Related terms cross-reference each other, so one lookup grows into a working understanding.
The stakes spelled out
Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Find it in your own account
Open the control panel and find where this concept lives — seeing it attached to your own site is what turns a definition into understanding.
- 2
Check what the defaults are
Confirm how your account has this set. It is usually right by default here, and now you will know rather than guess.
- 3
Follow the terms next door
Concepts travel in packs — Domain Privacy, Domain Registrar and Domain Name finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Can I look up who owns any domain?
Less and less. Redaction and privacy services hide individual details across most of the namespace now. Registrar, dates and status stay visible, and for commercial domains the identity is usually on the website itself rather than in the record.
Why does WHOIS accuracy matter on my own domain record?
The underlying registrant record, even when the public view is masked, governs disputes, transfers and recovery. Wrong details can void a registration or cost you the name in a challenge. Mask it publicly by all means, but keep the record itself true.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
Do you shift an existing site across at no charge?
We do. Open a ticket with the login details for your current host and the whole lot comes over: files, databases, mailboxes and configuration. You check the copy before DNS changes hands, and the old site keeps serving customers until the new one takes the traffic, so nobody ever sees a gap.
How do I pay, and does it bill again on its own?
Orders go through a secure checkout by credit or debit card, and the renewal is taken at the same price you first paid. Every invoice sits in the client area for you to read, and switching auto-renewal off is a toggle in your account rather than a phone call.
Can I set the PHP version myself?
Yes — PHP versions are chosen per site from the control panel, so an old application and a current one can sit side by side on the same account. Extensions and per-site settings live in the same screen, and none of it needs a support ticket.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
Read next
Domain Name
A domain name is the human-readable address of a website — the memorable piece of text that DNS converts in…
Domain Privacy
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