How It Works

Hosting Details is three free lookup tools in one place: a general domain/IP check, a raw DNS query tool, and a website security scanner. No account, no ads, nothing tracked. This page walks through what each one actually does.

1. The homepage: domain and IP lookup

Type a domain (example.com) or an IP address (8.8.8.8) into the box on the homepage and press Check. Depending on what you entered, you'll get some or all of the following, side by side:

WHOIS / RDAP - who registered the domain (as far as disclosed by the RDAP/WHOIS), which registrar, and the key dates (creation, expiry, last updated). All other information is hidden, but only a click away, using the "Show Raw" buttons. We use RDAP as the leading protocol, and WHOIS as the fallback, in case there's an issue with RDAP for any given registry.
IP Information - the resolved IP address, its network/organisation, and rough geographic location.
DNS Records - nameservers, mail servers (MX), and SPF record at a glance.
SSL Information - the certificate currently presented on port 443: issuer, validity dates, and which hostnames it covers.
DNSSEC Information - whether the domain has DNSSEC configured, and whether it's actually signed correctly.

E-mail addresses aren't accepted as input on this site, on any tool - only a domain name or an IP address.

2. DNS Lookup Tool

The DNS Lookup Tool is for when you want to see the raw records yourself, the way dig would show them, rather than a summarised version. A few things it can do that the homepage doesn't:

Query up to 10 hostname/record-type combinations in one go (e.g. example.com A, example.com MX, example.com TXT at once).
Choose which resolver answers the query: DNS4EU, Cloudflare, Quad9, Google, the domain's own authoritative nameservers, or up to 4 servers you specify yourself.
Trace mode, which follows the delegation chain from the root servers all the way down to the answer, one hop at a time - useful for working out exactly where a DNS problem lives.
Ask for the DNSSEC-related records (RRSIG, DNSKEY, DS) alongside the normal answer.

The DNS resolver behind this tool is written from scratch - it speaks the DNS wire protocol directly rather than leaning on a third-party library, which is also why it can offer things like Trace mode and custom nameservers in the first place.

3. Security Scanner

The Security Scanner takes a domain and scores three things independently:

HTTP Security Headers - whether headers like HSTS, Content-Security-Policy, and X-Frame-Options are present and reasonably configured.
SSL Health Check - certificate validity and hostname match, on port 443 by default. A port selector lets you check a mail server's certificate instead: POP3S/IMAPS/SMTPS (encrypted from the first byte), or the SMTP/IMAP/POP3 STARTTLS ports (587, 25, 143, 110), where the connection starts as plain text and is upgraded mid-conversation - a genuinely different check under the hood, not just a different port number.
Email Security - SPF, DMARC, and DKIM, the three records that determine whether e-mail claiming to be from this domain can be trusted.

Choosing a mail port hides the Header Security card (HTTP headers don't apply to a mail server) but keeps Email Security visible, since the two are related.

A note on what this scanner can't tell you

Neither the certificate check nor anything else on this site claims a certificate is "trusted" in the browser sense - that requires validating the full certificate chain against a trust store, which the tool (on this page) deliberately doesn't do, since it's built to let you inspect broken, expired, or self-signed certificates too, not just ones a browser would silently accept. What it does check, and reports honestly: whether the certificate's dates are currently valid, and whether it actually matches the hostname you asked about.

Under each test we link you to our own, more extensive tests, and to a site considered the authority on that specific field.

Want to go deeper?

For a domain you actually manage, Expert Tools checks individual protocols in real depth - SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNSSEC, DANE, MTA-STS, and more - each with its own explanation of what it does and why it matters, and a Wizard on several of them that builds a starting DNS record for you rather than only checking one you've already published. It's built for setting these up, not only for checking whether they're already there. Getting Started on that subdomain is the map: which checks matter most first, and what's worth adding once those are solid.

Why this exists

This is a solo-built, dependency-free project: no third-party PHP libraries, no tracking or analytics, self-hosted fonts, and a DNS resolver written from the ground up rather than wrapped around someone else's. If you're curious how your data is (and isn't) handled, that's covered in full in the Privacy Policy.