So I was doing some very hacky silly ways of looking up to see if a domain was registered or not, this was because running a who is command on my own was slow (at scale) and using most services to do the same were super expensive!
Then I was fortunate enough to stumble upon domainr.com that has a killer lightning fast API for lookups and they give you 10,000 searches a month for free and then every additionally thousand is $2.00. Not a bad deal!
Now all I have to do is tighten up the UI a bit, get my login logout stuff a little bit cuter and we should be good!
But for real search times dropped from minutes to 10s of seconds. I've still got a couple optimization tricks up my sleeves, that I'm excited to try out soon!