The Best Online Tools To Help You Know Everything About Web Sites
How do I contact the owner of a website? How popular is my site on Digg or Delicious? What other websites are hosted on my web server ? Is my competitor using WordPress or Drupal? xyz.com is loading fast, what is the name of their web hosting company ? Is my blog accessible from China or Japan ?
If you got questions like these in your mind, here are some of the most useful online tools to help you know each and every detail of any website on the planet.
Just-Ping.com - Just Ping help you know whether your website or blog is accessible from different cities of the world. Unlike other online ping services that run from one location, Just-Ping.com runs the ping command on your website from 26 different locations spread across the globe so you have a better idea about your site availability in different regions.
They even have a checkpoint in Shanghai so you can easily find out if some particular website is blocked in China or not.
WhoIsTheOwner.net - If you like to know the contact address, email and phone number of the website owner, this free service will help.
The problem with most whois services on the web is that they are tied to particular domain registrars. So if a website is registered with Network Solutions, you cannot find the ownership details of that site by doing a whois query on say Tucows or GoDaddy.
WhoIsTheOwner is different because it queries the whois database of all popular domain registrars. Extremely useful when sites steal your content and you want to send a warning email to the owner.
YouGetSignal.com - The web server that is hosting your website may also be housing dozens of other websites. YouGetSignal does a Reverse IP Check and lets you know about other websites that are hosted on the same web server as your site.
This is useful information because sometimes one bad site can impact all the neighbours. You may then request your web hosting company to move your site to a different web server.
Trivia: These alternate Google domains were determined with the help of YouGetSignal.com.
WhoIsHostingThis.com - Enter the URL of any website and this online service will show you the name of the company that’s hosting the website.
You need contact information of the web hosting provider for writing a DMCA Notice or if you are looking to switch web hosts.
SocialMeter.com - This service helps you determine the popularity of a web page on social sites like Digg, delicious, Google Bookmarks, etc.
Type the web address of any web page and Social meter will show you the exact number of times that page has been digged, bookmarked or saved on various social websites.
Related: How to Completely Test Any Website
Popuri.us - While Social Meter is for social bookmarking websites, Popuri is for estimating the relative popularity of a website with ranking data / inbound links from sites like Compete, Quantcast Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, etc. Useful when your are looking to sell or buy websites.
BuiltWith.com - Is Digg running on Apache or Windows Servers ? What advertising programs is Arrington using to monetize TechCrunch ? Is Google using Urchin for web analytics ? Is CNN using Akamai ?
For answers to all these questions, refer to BuiltWith - a website profiling service that tells you about all the technologies used in creating a website.
Want more ? Do check these DNS Tools and the AdSense Preview Tool.
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I believe the whois tool is not gonna work for domains that has been registered as private to hide the owner’s details and in most of the times the web hoster is not gonna respond if we mail them complaining about a specific site about content stealing.
Thanks again, particularly for mentioning WhoIsTheOwner.net. I have seen some of my feeds in various web sites…
domaintools.com is also pretty good for whois and a whole whost of other domain related info. And like Sara pointed out, if the owner info is locked/private, you can not directly contact the owner though you still may be able to contact the owner via the domain registrar.
BTW, netcraft.com is another nifty and probably the original site that shows info related to what a OS/web-server a particular domain is using.
Nic e, helps you find you bookmarks easier.
Some of this also available at http://www.dnsstuff.com/
Nice resource list. These should come in handy when looking for web hosts. In playing around, I did notice two items. 1. Sites that have a dedicated IP may appear to be on their own server even if other sites are on the same box. 2. The tools may not show resellers. I noticed a friend’s site showed as being hosted at The Planet, but he’s a reseller of a reseller….
Note to the unwary: builtwith.com has JavaScript which breaks under Firefox. It works just fine with Opera, though. Since it’s “built with” ASP.NET, this shouldn’t surprise anybody too much…