Engineers,

I ran across Abongo.com while looking for some webmaster tools. Abongo is for web professionals from sys admins to bloggers to figure out how a site is hosted on the net. It provides a range of tools all set up to provide all the data available but translated into a readable format. The codes that come out of some of these tools are translated into what the codes mean; countries come out as countries not cryptic symbols.

For a smaller website you can see how you look from different parts of the world. When you run ‘Ping’ Abongo tells you that it sent 64 bytes 4 times from each of its dedicated servers to the site you name, calculates the average response time, and gives you a nice 2 page report on how long it takes to find your site from anywhere from Tokyo to Hamburg. When you run tracert (trace route) it shows the route from a distant location (abongo is currently showing 8 locations). Again, you get a nice report with full information on the routing from all over the world to your website.

When you run DNS you get the full range of information associated with the site. A map of where they are hosted, the records for their Name, Alias, Mail and IPV4 and IPV6 records. There are other specialized tools for webmasters including a Host lookup, Page Rank, RDNS, and Whois which tells you all the publicly available information on the ownership of the domain.

Most serious webmasters will want to be looking at this for their sites and checking some parts monthly or more.