Registration System

The Registration System and the Domain Database

DENIC is the registry for domains under the Top Level Domain .de and thus an important and central interface in the Internet. In the following section, we want to tell you more about two central technical aspects of domain registration and administration.

The Registration System

Given the vast number of transactions involved, DENIC performs all domain registrations and all data updates completely automatically. For this purpose, its members have been provided with direct electronic access to the registration system and the database. They can use a Mail Registry Interface (MRI) or a Realtime Registry Interface (RRI) as well. Which interface is used for sending requests to the registration system is entirely up to the members. A variety of measures is applied to verify the identity of the DENIC member and the integrity of the contents of the domain request. They ensure that the domain data can be changed only by the authoritative member.

Domain registration is done using the "first come, first served"-principle. The decisive point is which request is written to DENIC’s database first by the registration system. This is important for the eventuality of DENIC receiving several requests for the same domain, some using the RRI and others using the MRI.

The system currently processes more than 1 million jobs per month. A registration request can be sent in at any time and it will normally be processed within a few minutes via MRI and within a few seconds via RRI. The same applies to updates of domain data or domain deletions. A full log is kept of all processing steps, and senders receive acknowledgements. In this way, it is always possible to trace back precisely the sequence and status of every job. In order to provide this performance, we take thorough care of our registration system with a program of permanent preventive maintenance, and we are also constantly expanding it.

The Domain Database

DENIC stores all domain and contact data in a central database. Parts of this database are accessible to everyone as a source of information, so that it is possible, for instance, at any time to make a public Domain query to find out whether or not a particular domain is still available for registration. This information service is also known as "whois".

whois has now become a synonym for the standardized search for domain data and is no longer limited to the protocol that was originally linked to this name (described and defined in RFC3912). Additionally to the information whether a domain is already registered, the response to the whois query contains domain and user data of domains that are already registered. These include information about the technical contact and the connect status of the domain (i.e. about reachability). whois can be accessed either via the TCP port 43 located on the DENIC whois server, whois.denic.de, or via the website. Please note that due to data privacy reasons data about the domain holder (Holder) and the administrative contact (Admin-C) can only be obtained via the web-whois. To avoid automated use of the whois service, the user must decipher a Captcha before the data is output. Every minute an average of approximately 1,000 requests is processed, in peak times this value even surges to more than 2,000 jobs per minute.