Zone Check
Zone Check offers a rapid, preliminary check for domain availability by leveraging cached zone file data. Ideal for large-batch queries, it provides a high confidence indication of a domain’s availability significantly faster than live registry checks. For definitive, real-time availability and pricing, you can follow up with the standard Check Availability call.
The API normalizes and validates each submitted domain string. Domains that fail validation, use an unsupported TLD for this service, or are otherwise not eligible for zone check are removed from the request before the zone file lookup runs. The response includes only a numeric count of removed domains (removed); individual removed strings are not returned. A future API version may extend the contract to include details about removed domains.
For the best results and to avoid 400 Bad Request errors after cleaning, ensure each domain string meets the criteria described for domainNames in the request body schema.
If no valid domains remain after this process, the API returns a 400 Bad Request response.
Note: The cached zone files used for this check are refreshed twice daily based on the latest available data from the registries.
Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.name.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Authorizations
Authenticate via HTTP Basic with your account username and API token. Examples use an explicit 'Authorization: Basic <base64(username:token)>' header; 'curl -u username:token' is equivalent. For sandbox, append "-test" to your username and use your sandbox token on api.dev.name.com.
Body
Request body to check for availability
ZoneCheck request checks DNS zone files for the availability of the specified domains.
Array of domain names to check. Each entry is normalized and validated before zone check runs. Entries that are not valid domain strings, that use unsupported TLDs for this service, or that fail other pre-validation rules are omitted from the check; the response removed field reports how many were omitted (not which values).
Valid domain string (after normalization) — for reliable results and to avoid errors once all entries are removed:
-
Allowed characters: ASCII letters (
a–z), digits (0–9), and hyphens (-). -
Hyphen rules: A domain (the part between dots) must not start or end with a hyphen (for example,
-test.comandtest-.comare invalid). -
Domain length: Each domain must be between 1 and 63 characters.
-
Internationalized domains (IDNs): Non-ASCII characters (for example
öorñ) should be submitted as Punycode (xn--...) for consistent registry resolution.
1 - 500 elements1["example.com", "example.net", "example.org"]["test.net"]Response
Successful response for a DNS zone check.
Response for checking domain availability via DNS zone checks.
Total number of records checked
5
Number of domain strings removed during pre-validation (invalid format, unsupported TLD for this service, etc.). This is a count only; the response does not list which strings were removed.
1