It’s not uncommon for someone who knows of or visits a website to want to find out a little bit more about it. This could be out of simple curiosity or might possibly be something more serious like checking the validity of a website and its location and who the owner is. Finding out the background information for a site you’re not sure about could help the decision of whether to visit it or find out more beforehand. Looking to see where a site is coming from or who hosts it could also help if you are having issues accessing sites in certain countries or particular hosting services.
A domain name is a simple identifier label that makes a website unique on the internet and it is easily possible to gather other details about it such as who it is registered with, when it was registered or the date it is due to expire. There are a number of different websites online that can provide you with domain Whois database information as well its related DNS records.
A tiny utility called DomainHostingview from NirSoft can help if you want detailed information about a website domain. The program generates a sizeable report by querying a number Whois and DNS services bringing you a comprehensive amount of information to study. DomainHostingview can pull in details for things like who hosts the web server and mail server, domain name server (DNS) details and records, created/expiry dates, IP address information, domain owner and who registered it. Being Unicode it can also handle displaying non-English characters in the report.
The program is only around 200K which is actually quite large for a NirSoft program, and is obviously a standalone portable executable. The latest version now allows you to generate the report as an html file without opening the main window, which is good if you want to check a few websites without too much interruption or from a batch file. Use the ‘/GenerateReport Domainname Filename’ command line option. As an example:
DomainHostingView.exe /GenerateReport Raymond.cc ‘d:\downloads\Report1.html’
DomainHostingview is so easy to use you really can’t get it wrong. Just type in the domain to check into the box and hit the ‘Go’ button or press F9 to start the lookup. The program doesn’t want the ‘www.’ prefix entered into the name box, so remember not to enter it. After a small wait of up to 15 seconds or so, the report will be completed. There should be enough information there for you to chew over. As with most NirSoft tools, you can copy the data to the clipboard or use the ‘File’ menu or floppy disk icon to save the report into an html file. If it is required, there is an advanced option (F8 or through the ‘File’ menu) to enter a custom DNS server.
Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 32 and 64bit