If you’re an e-commerce business owner, you’re probably familiar with the ICANN WHOIS Database. This treasure trove of information contains the names, phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses of all the website owners in the world. While diligent webmasters can choose to register their websites privately, many new site owners don’t have the know-how or simply don’t take the time to do so.

Not only is this information publicly available with a quick search, its completely free for anyone to look at and use. By simply entering the name of a website and clicking search, anyone with an internet connection can have access to that site’s registration details. Let’s explore what you can do with this information, and later we’ll also talk about how to use proxies to perform a WHOIS database download and get access to large chunks of this incredible repository all at once.

What Can You Do with WHOIS Data?

What many business owners don’t know however, is that this information-rich database can be used to their advantage to grow and help their business. You can make it work for you by using it to implement focused online marketing campaign and other unique business strategies.

Find Potential Clients

One of the easiest uses of the WHOIS data is to access an ever-growing list of new business and their phone numbers and email address to whom you can market your products or services. If your business model utilizes cold calling, you can use the database as the largest, and best of all free, contact list for your marketing strategy.

Learn About and Connect with Similar Businesses

By scraping WHOIS data specific to your business’ niche you can learn about and connect with other business owners in your field. This allow you to understand your competition better by researching their website, finding out what their business is lacking that yours can provide. You can also use this as an opportunity to find collaborators in your field. Trading blog posts between similar websites can significantly drive up traffic and search ranking for both sites, making it likely that they’ll be as interested in working with you as you are with them.

Data Harvesting Proxies

Although you can search through all this data one website at a time, it is much easier to use specialized tools that let you access hundreds of data points all at once. A database scraper alongside a good proxy service will allow you to perform a WHOIS Database download in a matter of minutes, exporting the information to an easy to use file.

It’s important to utilize data harvesting proxies though, otherwise your IP address might get banned form the WHOIS servers. When a scraping tool begins downloading the database, it quickly sends requests to their servers. Due to the speed and frequency of these requests, the server thinks it’s under attack from that particular IP and decides to ban it. By using a good proxy alongside your scraper, your IP address will change every few minutes, never even alerting the database that it’s being scraped.