Web Hosting Tools

This article is about useful tools related to web hosting in general, such as: where is a website's hosting server located, who's also staying on that server, when will the domain name expire, how to monitor a website uptime and so on.

Who is ... ?

When you register a domain name, the owner's information becomes available for whois searches unless you decide to make the data private. The whois record contains information on the domain name, the registrar, the registrant, the administrative and the technical contact (in case they are different from the registrant). There is a tool that not only provides that kind of information, but also information on:

• Server Data. Find out who's hosting the domain name and on which datacenter, the IP address and the type of the web server, if the domain name is blacklisted and what's the domain status;
• Domain Name History. IP and DNS history, as well as the registrant history;
• Other TLDs. See if other extension are available for registration or up for a bidding.

Your Neighbours

If you're hosted on a shared hosting account, you are sharing the server's resources with maybe hundreds of other websites. Hundreds might sound like a big number but it depends on what kinds of websites are hosted with you on the same server. If your hosting neighbours are mainly static html websites that get 10-20 visitors per day, your website will work just fine even with 400-500 "neighbours". So a smaller number is not necessarily better, it also depends on the size and traffic of the other hosted web sites. But how can you know who are your neighbours? Here's a nice reverse IP domain check tool; just enter the name or the IP of your website and find out who else is sharing the web server with you.

Check Your Uptime

A good uptime is important because long and often website downtimes can reduce your credibility, your sales and might drop you from search engines' indexes (because your website wasn't available for indexing on successive crawling attempts. Unless you plan to check your website every two hours or so, some automated monitoring tools will be a better option. We found two nice free website uptime monitoring tools; you need to sign up with an email address and then you will receive alerts on that email when and if your website(s) is(are) down.