Whois information for a website is really important. From the info., you could figoure out the status of the website, where the website is hosted, who are the regiestars, who is the registant if exposed to the public. When you register a new domain, then you probably would like to know what kind of information about your site and/or yourself are posted to the public. Someone may not want to show the personal info, such as name, address, email, phone number, and ect., then it's possible to consider of 'Whois Privacy'.
I use this site who.is to check the whois information quite a lot, one think I like is that there are no any lookup limits so that I could look up as many websites, and as many times, as I need. You also could check the DNS records, ranks, and many other types of informaiton. It seems to have very close relationship with name.com, but I wouldn't care the ads and the links of name.com save my time sometimes since I have many domains registered through name.com.
Recentlly I made some hosting transfers, when I changed the name servers for a wite, the whois information on this site was updated instantly! It's definitely worth to try it.
