I personally don't feel that this is a reason for concern (very very small chance but yes it is possible). But there is a faster way anyway, cutting out web server not responding etc.

So in any case if you wanted to lessen that chance you could query any public nameserver, assuming you can trust that nameserver.

In a command window, using nslookup as an example, the process would be (using google public dns server but you can use anything that's the point):

nslookup

> server 8.8.8.8

Default server: 8.8.8.8

Address: 8.8.8.8#53

> skymarshal.com

Server: 8.8.8.8

Address: 8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: skymarshal.com

Address: 208.91.197.26 (comment: name taken!)

> skymarshalxyz.com

Server: 8.8.8.8

Address: 8.8.8.8#53

server can't find skymarshalxyz.com: NXDOMAIN

> www.skymarkshalxyz.com (I made this up)

Server: 8.8.8.8

Address: 8.8.8.8#53

server can't find www.skymarkshalxyz.com: NXDOMAIN

> exit

"can't find" - name might be available - we have determined it's not resolving. Could be a dns issue of course but it's a good first step.

Doing with a browser can give you MORE of a false positive. DNS could respond with an address but the site could be down. Of course getting no response to DNS doesn't ALWAYS mean the domain is available but it's generally fairly accurate. At that point you would do a whois to confirm.

You can write a shell script of course to automate this from the command line.