Domains and Webhosting #3

It is quite common to require information about domain names during our work with webhosting and the market of domains.

There are specific tools that one can use to find the WHOIS record of a domain name, find who has allocated a specific IP address, ping or traceroute a hostname, view the history of a domain name registration and many more.

If you do not want to install individual tools for each of the above, you can use domaintools.com.

domaintools.com allows to

domaintools.com used to be the whois.sc website. domaintools.com offers XMLRPC access so that you can add domain-related functionality to your Web applications.
Another service is dnsstuff.com. You can access through the Website or using this Firefox extension.

With dnsstuff.com you can

  • retrieve a DNS report of potential errors for a domain name, http://www.dnsreport.com/
  • check any speed issues when resolving names (this affects how responsive your website appears), i.e. http://www.dnsstuff.com:8080/tools/dnstime.ch?type=A&name=simos.info
  • WHOIS lookup
  • show the abuse contact of a domain (can also be obtained from the general WHOIS record)
  • find whether a mailserver of a domain is in the spam database,
  • do a reverse DNS lookup and show all steps taken
  • find the geolocation of an IP address/hostname, if possible
  • find the cached DNS entries for specific hostnames at popular DNS servers (helpful when you change DNS information for your domain)

Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/domains-and-webhosting-3/

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