10xwhois is a domain availability checker / whois tool. Using this you can whether a single or a set of domain names are available. Just select your preferred tlds and then enter the domain name you want. Domain availability will be instantly shown. 10xwhois remembers your favorite domain extensions and you don’t need to select it again!

Features

• Provides instantantaneous domain availability status.
• Over 25 tlds are currently supported. More will be available in future.
• Supports multiple tld lookups at the same time.
• For non available domains, whois service is available.
• You can use dreamhost to register available .com, .org, .info and .net domains.
• Saves your preferred tlds and you don’t need to enter them again (browser cookies must be enabled for this).
• Use keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+S) to save your favorite domain searches temporarily during domain search.

Architecture

10xwhois is built using Yahoo’s JavaScript toolkit YUI. The domain availability is checked using Ajax request and is designed to be extremely fast.

10xwhois project is hosted on a dedicated server (slicehost). This application is built on J2EE stack but doesn’t use any frameworks such as Struts. This application is designed so that large concurrent requests for domain availability can be handled without excessive system resources such as memory. For example, the tld to whois server mapping data is preloaded and is cached at the application level. This ensures that all clients share the same lookup data.

One of the problems with YUI is that it is heavy. The JavaScript files are comparatively big and over a dialup line it will take a while to download. So if you are using 10xwhois on a slow link, it will take a few seconds for the site to load. This is a one time delay since the JS files are cached by browser. The firebug screenshot on the right side will give you an idea about the download size.

As you can see the total size is over 160kb. Over a dialup line of 56KBPS it will take over 20 seconds for 10xwhois to load. Interestingly 10xwhois is using a very small subset of YUI. For a typical Web application built over YUI, the page download size will come around 1MB! This is an important trade off you need to keep in mind before deciding on YUI toolkit.

Version History