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What follows is a series of tools that I find useful and hopefully you will also, to check various Internet settings. Not all of them are directly security related; some are related to availability and performance. Some of the tools are useful for all users as well, but most are more useful to web site developers and/or IT operations folks. If so, that is noted.
Hosting Checker – where is a site hosted?
Check out dotcom-monitor. While not free, it is affordable (starts at $20 a month). It generates great reports and will alert you immediately if a resource becomes unavailable. Here is one sample report:
You can control how often the tests run and from what locations, the alerts and they also have an API to integrate it into your own application.
Down detector provides a history of requests for a given site. For example, if you go to Downdetector.com you can enter a web site or ISP name.
In this we will enter Comcast and get this response back
If you click on the Comcast graphic and then scroll down, you will see this
This represents the number of people who asked about Comcast being up in the last 24 hours. The higher the number, the greater likelihood there is a problem.
Scroll down some more and you can see a live outage report map. While this one shows a lot of yellow, you should more concerned if it shows a lot of red.
Want to know what the overall state of the Internet is. Here is one tool. Go to Pingdom’s Livemap and you will see this:
Want to see a different view of the health of the Internet? The Internet Traffic Report scores the Internet’s health by continent.
If you click on one of the linnks below (like Asia) you will see what comprises that score. The score is based on response time and packet loss. If you click on one of the individual sites, you will see a graph of that site over time:
Ever wonder where a web site is hosted? Go to www.HostingChecker.com and enter the web site in question. For example, I entered ESPN.COM and this is what I got back.
Of course an organization like ESPN has servers all over the world, so this is just a gateway for them, at the particular moment, but if you were to enter a smaller company, you will likely get it’s one and only data center.
Need to know where an IP address is hosted? Go to https://www.whatismyip.com/ip-address-lookup/ and enter the IP address in question. For example, I entered the IP address of a local TV station’s web site and this is what came back:
This site uses two different location services and you can see that they came back with different cities, but the same ASN – at Amazon. Boardman is about 2 hours east of Portland and near a great source of hydro powered electricity, which is very cheap.