Some of the information that I look-up as part of the research are the whois information and DNS records of the website in question.

DomainHostingView is a new Nirsoft application that seems to have been designed specifically for that purpose. The portable software looks-up information about a domain or website.

All the user needs to do is to enter a domain name in the form at the top of the application to generate a domain report for the domain.

It takes a few seconds to generate the report before it appears in the interface. The report begins with a summary at the top listing the important bits of information at the top. This includes the domain registrar and company or individual it is registered to, the web hosting company, mail server and information about the domain creation, update and expiration dates.

The program seems to have problems identifying some information from subdomains (like www.ghacks.net) correctly.

DNS Records, IP Addresses Information, Raw Domain Information, Web Server IP Address Information, Mail Server IP Address Information and Name Server IP Address Information follow after the summary.

All the information on the screen can be highlighted, copied and pasted easily. There is also the option to generate an HTML report of the current domain report. Reports can be saved locally for future reference.

The program is missing a few elements that other Nirsoft applications offer. This includes exporting the data to a txt or XML file, or printing a selection or all of the information. It is likely that at least part of the missing features will make their way into future versions of the application.

DomainHostingView is a portable program for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. The program is available for download at the Nirsoft website.

One great service that is displayed lots of information is Quarkbase (via Feed My App) which uses the tagline “Everything about a website”. It’s definitely not everything but it is more than you might expect. The service is free and the user can enter an url in the search form or a name that can be associated with the website. The system accepts google.com, Google or Google inc for example.

Information are divided into a quick excerpt at the top with the most important information like their company name, founder, number of employees, some traffic ranks and blog url. A custom introduction follows suit that contains a description, contact information and similar & related sites.

The rest of the detailed information are divided into the categories Popular, Traffic, People, Spotlight, Company and Technical each containing a wealth of information about the website and company.

Popular refers to social popularity, bookmarks at Delicious, pages posted on Digg and Reddit, blog reactions from Technorati,references in Yahoo Answers, inbound links from Wikipedia, Digg frontpage occurrences and comments on Stumbleupon.

That’s not all. You get popular pages of the week, all time popular pages and feed urls in the same category. That alone is an amazing amount of information. But that was only the Popular category.

Traffic seems to utilize information from Alexa which is not that reliable but a good indicator nevertheless in most cases.

People lists people that are associated with the domain name or company. If available their title is listed as well.

Spotlights pulls the latest references from Twitter, Techcrunch, Google News, Get Satisfaction and from Technorati if those references are available.

Technical is the last category which lists information about the web server, location, nameservers and the like.

The tool is rather extensive and well done. It could improve the traffic section by using other sources which would be nice. Other than that it gives a great overview over a domain name. Popular websites are already in the index. If you request information about a website for the first time (I entered rarst.net to test it out) it is showing a progress bar and it usually takes a bit longer before the information are provided.