The idea arose a long time ago, after Switch started to make the whole .ch DNS-zone available for the public. I've written about generating a list of all .ch domains back in the beginning of 2021.
After playing around with event-sourced application architectures in the past two years, the idea for "something with domains" that "automatically does something" came up again.
What does the Domainbot do?
As of now (beginning of 2026), the Domainbot basically fetches the list of "active" domain names daily from the .ch-Zone, detects changes compared to the day before and memorizes those changes as events. From those events, a list of domains is projected and made available to search through.
There exist a lot of fancy ideas what else could be done based on that data - of what additional data could be additionally added.
But why?
Well deserved question... Simple answer? Just for fun and to see if it works out :-)
Contributors
The following fine folks have helped to create Domainbot, be it brainstorming, discussing ideas, designing the visual appearance of the application or letting me do what was needed. Thank you!
- Claudio
- my family
Indirectly also my employer Ops One supports this project as it runs on a managed server there.
FAQ
Your question is not answered here? Please contact me.
What is an "active" domain?
As we don't have insight into the registry database of course, we can only evaluate the .ch-Zonefile. That zonefile does only contain the domain names that have configured nameservers. I consider those to be "active" in the sense as they are not "parked" like a domain name that was just registered but left inactive without nameservers.