I’m proud to announce today that I am beginning a new series of video tutorials for Tubetorial that will focus on plagiarism detection, abuse reporting and other related issues. The first of those videos, entitled “How to Find the Host of a Site” was posted yesterday and is now embedded below.

Some may remember that I did a similar video back in 2007, however, the new video is a much more up-to-date version of that video focusing on both Domain Tools and WhoIsHostingThis. This video should explain how to find the host of a site both more easily and more accurately than the previous version.

I’ve also replaced the video on the “Finding the Host” page of the site with new one since it does provide instruction on the new tools (besides, the previous video even showed the old layout for the site).

The video, for those who are interested, is also embedded below:

But while AbouThiSite was interesting, its data is woefully incomplete, forcing me to continue relying on other sites for most of my information.

However, long-time reader Voyagerfan5761 alerted me to a similar, though more complete, service that had flown under my radar. The service, Quarkbase, promises to provide “Everything About a Site” and to be everything I wanted AbouThiSite to be.

So, I excitedly gave the site a whirl and learned quickly that it is a huge step in the right direction, but not quite the endgame I was hoping for.

What It Does

Quarkbase works very similarly to other sites in this field. Users either punch in the domain they are interested in or use their bookmarklet, to pull up information from dozens of resources about the domain a site is hosted on.

That information is then broken up into seven different categories, which can either be scrolled through on the default “All” page or quickly selected via the tabs at the top. Those sections are as follow:

1. Introduction: This includes basic information about the site including its name, common tags, contact information, logo and slogan.
2. Social Popularity: This analyzes how well the site has performed on various social sites including Digg, Reddit, Delicious, etc. Also pulls the subscriber account from FeedBurner if possible.
3. Traffic: This pulls in a variety of traffic estimates from Alexa. Though notoriously unreliable, it does provide clues as to which countries most frequently visit a site and a general idea of popularity.
4. People: Takes a best guess at the person or people that run the site. It is not clear where this information comes from.
5. Spotlight: This section attempts to glean who is “talking” about a domain, specifically by looking at Twitter. Though flawed in that it can’t parse TinyURLs, which are heavily used on the service, it still works surpringly well.
6. Company: Only shows up on reports of sites owned by a company. Offers company profile information and job postings for the company that owns the site.
7. Technical: This is the “meat” of the site’s information from an abuse standpoint, providing information on who is hosting the site, what the nameservers are and the location of the server.

Quarkbase is able to do this by bringing together information from a variety of sources including Alexa, Zoominfo and more.

The result of all of this information is that the results page is extremely large and, at times, slow loading. The initial page is also very cluttered, though the tab feature makes it much easier to cut to what you need.

All in all, the information that Quarkbase provides is very robust and very simple to use, however, there are a few hiccups that prevent me from making this service my default.

Small Roadblocks

The biggest issue I have with Quarkbase is that the information, in particular in the Technical section, is questionable at best. For example, when looking up Hostgator’s main site, the site doesn’t even fathom a guess as to the hosting provider. It correctly guesses that the ISP is “THEPLANET.COM INTERNET SERVICES” but even that is not completely accurate as Hostgator is its own host, just using ThePlanet’s servers.

This was an issue that has tripped up other services, including Domain Tools, and prompted a fix from WhoIsHostingThis. During many of my tests, Quarkbase refused to even guess about the host information, instead just leaving that line blank, and the ISP information was dubious at best.

Other information on the service was unreliable as well. Alexa’s traffic data is notoriously unreliable, though still an understandable choice under the circumstances. Also, information in the “Introduction” section is routinely either left blank or inaccurate, especially the contact information on non-company sites.

This limits the usability of the service, especially when competing sites such as WhoIsHostingThis have largely overcome many of the same challenges, but it still remains one of the most complete overviews of a site or domain that you can get, even with the hiccups and speedbumps.

Conclusions

Quarkbase is far from perfect, but what it does it does well. Though its results are not as technically-oriented as Domain Tools or as accurate as WhoIsHostingThis, its sheer breadth of data makes it great for a “quick overview” of a site’s information.

Though I again don’t think Webmasters and bloggers will get a lot of use from this tool when chasing down scrapers and plagiarists, especially since the site does not do subdomains at this time, it could provide some assistance with directly contacting infringers, locating the host and learning about the background of a site before moving in.

If nothing else, it might be worth seeing what Quarkbase turns up on an infringing domain just to see if there is anything you were unaware and can use, such as an email address or contact form.

I can pretty much promise you that you will learn something about every site you punch into this service, the question is how accurate and useful will that information be.

AbouThiSite attempts to be one of latter kind of mashups, providing valuable information about a target domain at the click of a button.

But how useful is it in the real world? The answer, sadly, is not very much. It won’t be a part of my arsenal, not unless it adds some additional data. Still, there is much that can be gleaned from it, if others are willing to listen.

What it Does

The idea behind AbouThiSite is very similar to WhoIsHostingThis and Domain Tools in that you punch in a domain and receive back vital information on it. But where Domain Tools is targeted at those who are familiar with networking tools and WhoIsHostingThis focuses on making the process of finding a site’s host simple, AbouThiSite attempts to provide a different set of information in an easy to approach manner.

This includes the following:

1. The IP Address
2. Other Sites Likely on the Same Server
3. The location of where the site is hosted.
4. The PageRank/Traffic of the Site
5. Information About the Colors and HTML of the Site

This information is then displayed in a colorful and easy-to read page that includes a Google Map of the estimated server location, a preview of the site and a link to subscribe to the site’s RSS feed, if it has one.

It is indeed incredibly easy to use, but, for Webmasters dealing with content theft or abuse issues, it is a fairly useless service. In fact, outside of some limited SEO purposes, I have a very difficult time imagining why anyone would favor AbouThiSite over other sites.

Missing Details

The most useful aspect of AbouThiSite is the SEO elements. Having the PageRank, rough traffic and IP information in one place is useful. Though the traffic stats seem to underestimate every site I punched in, the relationships between them made sense.

However, you can get most of this information elsewhere, the only advantage with AbouThiSite being that the information is very cleanly laid out and easy to read. Whether that is worth the trip is up to each Webmaster to decide.

For those wanting to deal with abuse issues, this site is missing critical information that one needs including Whois information, information about the actual host of the site (other than its location) and provides no easy means to obtain it.

Since all of the useful information can easily be procured off another site and you will have to go there regardless to get the information you need, there is little reason to make AbouThiSite a stop at all.

Lessons

This isn’t to say that AbouThiSite is a bad tool, just that it doesn’t fill any needs that I have. There is still a great deal it does right and others may find it useful.

What I sincerely hope is that other sites, especially Domain Tools, might take a look at the way AbouThiSite displays information and glean a few lessons from it, namely how to put a lot of information about a site in front of viewers in a clean, attractive manner.

Though appearance is definitely not everything when looking for tools to help you get the information you need, it does count, as WhoIsHostingThis has showed us. The easier a site is to read, the quicker we get the information.

Likewise, though WhoIsHostingThis is laser-focused and clean to use, it could also benefit from some additional information, such as the location of the host (at least the country) and, perhaps, the whois data.

The bottom line though is that AbouThiSite offers a glimpse of what a good domain information mashup could be without actually being that mashup.

Conclusions

The bottom line is that, if AbouThiSite has information that you find useful, then by all means use it. It’s a fast, user-friendly site that is easy to pick up and add to your toolbox. I, personally, don’t have much use for it nor do I see how others might.

That being said, it appears to me that the site is more of a proof of concept than a finished product and, with that in mind, the concept it does show is valuable.

The Web may not have a lot of use for this site, but there is a lot it could learn from it, if one is willing to listen.

The techniques for determining who a host is are, at best, complicated and somewhat geeky in nature. Though I wrote a guide on how to use some tools for finding the host, the process remains one of the most common questions I get asked about.

At least one site, WhoIsHostingThis, has attempted to simplify this process. Turning into a Google-style experience. Previously reported on here the site did a respectable job in most cases, though there were some peculiar results on some tests.

The idea is that the networking wizardry should be hidden from the user and the site should receive a domain (or bookmarklet click) and then simply return the host. A great theory, especially for the non-tech oriented, but due to the nature of the work it is not always reliable. Most who are familiar with the tools, myself included, tended to lean on more sophisticated sites, such as DomainTools.

However, an upgrade at WhoIsHostingThis is attempting to change that, by fixing the kinks and bugs and, potentially, making the site a one-stop shop for domain hosting and information.

Some Geek Stuff

The typical way to determine the host of a site is a tool called IP Whois. Basically, IP Whois works like this:

1. All servers on the Web (as well as all computers or routers facing the Web) resolve to an IP address, a set of four numbers from 0-255.
2. Those IP addresses are controlled and doled out by various Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that are non-profit oversight boards that help control these limited resources. ARIN is the RIR for the United States and North America.
3. When RIRs assign IP addresses, they keep a registry of who is assigned what numbers. That information can be queried by an IP Whois.
4. The most common purchasers of IP addresses are Web hosts, such as GoDaddy, ISPs, such a your cable company, and academic institutions.
5. These institutions then allow their customers to use the IP address for accessing the Internet, hosting a site, etc. but usually do so only on their own network. Most of the time an IP address purchased by company X will point to a customer of their company.
6. Thus, an IP Whois can usually trace you back to who is hosting a particular site or at least who is responsible for the IP address at that particular location.

The procedure is far from perfect and, as we’ll explore there are ways it can be gamed. But it is far more accurate than other methods, such as looking at the DNS servers, which can be trivially changed by spammers and plagiarists.

It is also this method that has been largely utilized by WhoIsHostingThis with great results. However, where the site has struggled has been with exceptions to the rule, cases where the IP Whois is misleading or, worse still, downright wrong.

Though these are cases that can usually be corrected with other tools, such as traceroutes (which look at the path traffic takes to arrive at the destination) or the DNS information, that information has, traditionally, not been used by WhoIsHostingThis.

That is starting to change.

The “HostGator Problem”

In March of 2007, one of the largest moves in Web hosting took place as HostGator, the very popular budget Web host, moved much of its 500,000 plus domains into ThePlanet’s datacenter. Though the move made sense for both parties, it created an abuse reporting kludge that remains.

The problem is this, on those half million domains, the IP Whois information points to The Planet and not Hostgator since they are located within The Planet’s network. Thus many, myself included, have sent DMCA notices or spam reports to The Planet thinking that they were the host. This has created slow downs in addressing critical issues.

However, these problems are largely avoidable as the DNS servers, as well as other information, do point to HostGator as the host. The problem is that the information can be easily overlooked.

So, while this problem can be overcome by humans, it requires a fair amount of skill at reading networking and domain information and, even then, is prone to mistakes. WhoIsHostingThis is seeking to fix that problem by looking at multiple sources of information, including the DNS information, to determine who the host is.

In that regard it has already “fixed” the Hostgator problem, a search on the site for a HostGator domain reveals HostGator as the host, not The Planet. A similar result happens when you look for WordPress.com domains, as it shows WordPress as the host, not Layered Technologies.

Though the site provides the additional information below the main result, in case the results are mistaken, it is right in these cases.

Further Improvements

Though WhoIsHostingThis has already integrated many of the hosts that, like HostGator, have their IP addresses listed as being another service, this is not to say that they have all of them. The operators of the site admit that the site needs further improvements.

However, where the site was previously about 95% accurate with its information, it is now most likely well over 99%. These cases where the IP Whois was wrong were rare to begin with and the site has already fixed most of the larger outliers. This means that only a fraction of a fraction of domains should return any issues.

That being said, there are still issues and bugs to be worked out. For one, where the site does very well with U.S. and Canada-based hosts, international ones, especially those in languages other than English, seem to give the site trouble from time to time. Also, there are still at least some cases where the information might be technically correct, but does not provide a correct URL for the host or enough information to locate it.

However, as I said earlier, these are extreme outliers. For most cases, WhoIsHostingThis works very well and certainly good enough for those that don’t have the technical expertise to use traditional networking tools.

Conclusions

Personally, I’ve begun using the WhoIsHostingThis bookmarklet to help me determine the host of sites and only using DomainTools or other sites whenever I get a strange result. It’s worked very well these past few weeks (since the updates began) and I’ve been impressed with the work that they have done.

Though I’m never likely to use this site, or any other site, as my exclusive resource for this kind of information (best to have confirmation no matter what you use), the improvements at WhoIsHostingThis have really impressed me.

While there is clearly work to be done, the progress is clearly evident and I am very happy with the improvements they have been making.