WHMCS Availability Checker Deprecation
On 26/09/2023 we have decided to begin retiring our WHMCS Availability Checker functionality, read more below to see if this will affect you, and what actions you may need to take.
When will this happen?
There’s no need to worry for the moment, nothing is changing right away, however in the future this functionality will be officially unsupported and then removed from Synergy Wholesale’s API offerings.
The current planned shutdown of this API is scheduled for the 1st of June 2024. This date may be re-evaluated based on user feedback and usage of the API in the coming weeks, but to be safe you should ensure that you have made the changes outlined in this article as soon as possible to avoid being affected.
What does this affect?
The following are circumstances where you may be affected by this change:
- People using an unsupported version of WHMCS, more specifically ones before WHMCS 7.1
- People using the “WHOIS” lookup within WHMCS for their domain availability checks
- People manually calling
https://manage.synergywholesale.com/whmcs_availability_checker.phpto check availability of domains
What doesn’t this affect?
There is no impact to our existing SOAP API endpoints, such as checkDomain or domainInfo, this solely affects the removal of the standalone https://manage.synergywholesale.com/whmcs_availability_checker.php API endpoint.
There is also no impact to our customers running on a supported WHMCS version with our official domain module and are using the module as their domain lookup provider.
So no need to worry if you are integrating with our SOAP API already as you will not be affected by this.
If you are using using an up to date installation of WHMCS with our official domain module, you may be required to make a small change to your configuration if you are not using it as your lookup provider, but it should hopefully be as painless as clicking a few buttons.
What does this mean for me?
Depending upon your situation, you may need to perform certain actions to ensure you will not be affected in the future.
If you are using an unsupported WHMCS Version (< 7.1)
You will need to attempt to upgrade to a supported version of WHMCS, preferably WHMCS 8.0 or above.
If you are unable to upgrade to a newer version, then unfortunately you will not be able to make use of our official WHMCS Domain Module going forward and may need to seek an alternative method for your domain availability checks.
If you are using a supported WHMCS Version (8.0+)
You will want to check your your current domain availability provider within your WHMCS installation.
You can do this by navigating to the Domain Pricing section within your WHMCS installation and locating the Lookup Provider option in the top right hand corner.
If this is currently displaying the Synergy Wholesale logo, then you are already future proofed, otherwise you’ll want to click on the Change button and select Domain Registrar and then select Synergy Wholesale.
You’ll be provided with a list of TLDs you wish to perform lookups on, select which ones you want and click Save.
If you are calling the API manually
You’ll want to look at migrating to our SOAP API and using the checkDomain endpoint.
This will first require you to enable the Synergy Wholesale API in your account by clicking here and then whitelisting the IP address you will be making your API calls from.
If you are unsure of the IP address your API call may be coming from, you are able to perform a request to the following URL: https://manage.synergywholesale.com/ip and your IP address will be returned to you.
Some basic examples of this in a few programming languages are displayed below.
If your programming language of choice is not displayed, you may wish to seek out a well maintained SOAP API library for your language of choice and use that.
When configuring it, you’ll want to set the WSDL parameter or option to: https://api.synergywholesale.com/server.php?wsdl
You can find more information about our API by clicking here.
Bash
PHP
Note: Requires the SOAP PHP extension to be enabled.
