In the plethora of startups being created everyday with all the bells, whistles, gradients and rounded corners sometimes it’s good to know that people just create some stuff for the sole purpose of providing some information.
My good friend, I’ve never even met the guy - strange how the internet works, Stan from Frantic Industries gave me dibs on his new startup called Who is Hosting This?
Basically the service aims to provide you one piece of information and that is to find out who is hosting someone’s site. Why could this be useful? Well it’s good to know who other blogs or sites are hosting with when you get blown away by how some stand up better to others on “front page” status from various social sites. The Firefox plugin I use called About This Site gives me the Whois information but most of the time it shows me a 24 hour query limit reached - whatever that means.
So wrapped in a simple interface, you enter the domain for which you want to find out the host and ask it to tell you and it will. Here’s my host result. {I know, I know, I’m transferring soon}
It’s not 100% accurate (they say it is impossible, to their knowledge, to have 100% accurate info for this type of request), but using several different methods of retrieving the info the relevancy is as close as it gets.
Some more features include a tag cloud, a top list of most requested queries, a Firefox bookmarklet and a FF search engine plugin. Can I suggest a logo perhaps? The text one is fine but this is Web 2.0h, ya gotta have a snazzy logo.
Everybody Go To…Who is Hosting This.
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About the author
Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.
Jonathan Franzone on July 5th, 2007
1
Upon first reading this entry I thought… that’s kind of a novel idea, but pretty useless. But then I couldn’t help myself. I clicked the link and went over there. I spent several minutes playing on the site. Boy that is fun! If you are not happy with your current hosting provider I could see that it could be useful too.
mercutiom on July 5th, 2007
2
While I agree this is a great idea and if it worked well it would be great. Right now though it’s returning incorrect information for both the hosting companies I have. My PIMBY site is showing Dot5, when it should be IPOWER, and my Mark Miller Design site is showing Performance Service International.
I’m sure that they are doing their research through an IPWhoIs search. But they might want to consider looking up the nameservers as well. My information is clearly listed through a regular WhoIs search.
Like I said, it’s a great idea if they considered some other references. On another note, the reason your WhoIs plugin for FireFox fails most of the time is due to the fact that most WhoIs companies limit the amount of queries in a day from an IP, and that plugin pushes all requests through the same server, so yeah…they need to rewrite that too.
vinnie on August 8th, 2007
3
Here is another tool, unlike the other tool in the previous comment we attempt to give you the resseller of the hosting, since most of the time it’s the resseller who will make the server configurations and not the physical server.
The tool works with 90% of success till now and a demo is available here:
Http://www.who-hosts