Technical ConfusionBecause Technology Is Confusing

Domain Research Tools - DNS Tools

Nikkole of 7gens and I are discussing green web hosting, and how to research if a company is really green, or just claiming to be. It’s a long discussion, and you can read it here.

Since it is a long discussion, I’ve decided to write how I research domain names in a couple of new posts.

I’m skeptical of any company that claims to be green and doesn’t put their money where their mouth is. Truth of the matter is, very few can claim to be truly green: simply because the datacenters where they house their servers are not green, and not even close to it. Because of this, folks can be duped into thinking a hosting company is something it’s not.

Tools needed to help in domain research

Open a copy of Notepad, Word or your favorite text editor. Remember to save it. You’ll need a place to take notes (or you’ll find yourself constantly backtracking.)

Use a browser that has tabbed windows - like Firefox.

Online Tools

These tools will tell you all kinds of information like IP addresses, where a domain is hosted, abuse addresses.

http://dns-tools.domaintools.com/ - (Some free services, some paid)
http://www.4dnstools.com/ - This one is pretty comprehensive
http://www.iptools.com/ - Also comprehensive
http://network-tools.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/590 - If you use Firefox, this is a nifty little addon. It displays the ip address of the current page in your status bar. It enables you to copy the ip to the clipboard. This is not mandatory.

http://www.myipneighbors.com/ - This is a cool standalone dns tool that is good to have in your arsenal. You plug in a domain name or IP, and it will tell you how many sites are being hosted on a server.

Of any of the tools you choose above, these are the primary three utilities you will use:

WHOIS Lookup
The whois lookup or search is a database of all top level domains currently registered on the internet, and contains public information. Some people - and companies - will hide this info by using privacy services offered thru the domain registrar.

IP WHOIS Lookup
This is also a whois database search, only you’re looking for the owner of an IP address. This is usually a big company like Verio, or ATT. It also gives you names, addresses and contact info of the company who lease the IP addresses.

Reverse DNS lookup
This tool will tell you where a domain name or address should resolve. Not all domains and IP addresses resolve properly - they should if set up correctly. If not set up correctly, it can result in email issues. I use it because once in a while you’ll find an IP address doesn’t resolve to say your hosting company, but the people who host your hosting company.

I don’t want to overwhelm you with this stuff, so I’ll end the post on domain research tools here.

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What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is a name that resolves to an IP address, which is listed in a huge DNS database. You can think of this database as a phone book. The IP address is a phone number, and the domain name is the name that has the phone number.

Computers find each other by IP address, which looks like this: 123.123.123.123. This format is hard for a human to remember, so this is where a domain name comes into the picture. A human can remember a domain name, and so domain names are created to be more user friendly.

Parts of a Domain Name

There are several parts to a domain name. Let’s look at the domain name http://www.technicalconfusion.com

We will be starting with the far right, and read left.

.com - This is what’s called a “top level” domain name. It literally means commercial. There are others: .org for organization, .net for network, .ca for Canada. The list goes on.

technicalconfusion. - this is a first level domain name, which is off of the tree of the .com top level domain - to the left. “technicalconfusion.” resolves to your root folder, or user id given to you for your webhosting account.

www. - to the left of the top level and first level domain names, is a second level domain name, or, making it more complicated here, a subdomain. (Technically, everything other than the .com domain is nothing but a subdomain.)

You can continue making lower level domain names, although it’s impractical for a normal user to do this.

To get a first level domain name, you must go to a domain name registrar for this. My personal favorite is Godaddy.com, and even though I’ve used a number of registrars, they so far have been the best.

Recommended reading about DNS

DNS and Bind