Performing due diligence on a website

Checking the ownership of a website

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Tools

Places like Samspade have a lot of useful tools to see who is hosting the site (and it even provides WHOIS information). Netcraft will let you run searches on what operating system his hosting service is on, and on how reliable it is. Whois.sc (now "Domain Tools") lets you search a domain or an IP, find a site's "blacklist status", and even find other websites hosted on that same IP. There are various DNS, Reverse DNS, IP Whois, and abuse/SPAM lookups at DNS Stuff. Other useful tools include DNS Lookup where you can see if the domain's name servers and mail servers are working, whether there've been any custom modifications to the DNS records (CNAME/MX).... and if you don't know what all that domain Latin is they even explain it in simple terms.

What to do with the results?

Use WHOIS to query the domain. Note all the details the WHOIS search provides.

- Check if the domain is "locked". If it is note that it may take a day or two to unlock before it can be transferred.

- The length of time the site's been online is crucial. Older sites are considered well established/grandfathered and less likely to be spammy. Beware though that if a domain expired and was renewed it loses its previous history and is considered a new domain for all practical purposes. It also loses the value of incoming links it built up.

- The length of registration remaining is crucial. Some believe that search engines - Google in particular - go on the assumption that valuable domains are registered for longer periods of time. It may be to the site's advantage if it has already been registered for several years into the future.

- If the domain was sold recently and moved from one registrar to another it may be another sixty days before it can be moved again.

- Certain TLDs (top level domains) like .org work to slightly different rules, you may want to familiarise yourself with them before you bid for the site. Others like .gov may have limitations on who can buy/register the domain. Some country specific domains like the .co.uk used in the United Kingdom allow private owners to withhold their personal details.

- If the owner's full details, including name, address and working phone number are not included in the WHOIS you may want to seek some additional verification of ownership. If they are check that the details match those of the seller and you can double check by phoning him on the number listed in WHOIS.