When I built my first website, I quickly realized how important it was to know every single detail about it—not just the design or content, but the background too. Whether you’re a business owner, a researcher, or just curious, you’ll often want to find out who the owner is, what domain it’s on, where it’s hosted, and which services or platforms it’s using. Using a whois lookup can give you information such as the name, email, and registration details of the registrant, along with the domain registrar, admin, and technical support contact. Sometimes, privacy settings or proxy protection may hide this public record, but even then, tools provided by ICANN can be a helpful route to track a person or organization behind the site.

From my own experience, I’ve often had to check the IP address, server location, and DNS setup to understand the infrastructure of a particular web service. Using online utilities, I could run a traceroute, resolve the address, and map the geolocation of the host. This is useful when analyzing whether a site is on shared hosting with other websites (known as neighbors) or has a dedicated hosting provider. In some cases, especially when dealing with international websites, it’s important to see if the site is accessible from China, considering the firewall, censorship, and connectivity restrictions within that region. You can test availability, detect if it’s blocked, and examine the global reach across mainland and external locations.

As a final note, a question I’m often asked is: What is the ideal number of pages for a website? Honestly, there’s no magic number—it depends on your content, CMS like WordPress or Gatsby, your framework, and whether your platform is built for blogs, e-commerce, or portfolios. But the key is ensuring that each page serves a purpose, aligns with your technology stack, and works well with your front-end and back-end goals. With themes, plugins, ads, and even ad networks like AdSense or Media.net integrated for monetization, the right analysis of trackers, programmatic banners, or affiliate sources can make your site a successful publisher hub. Always use reverse lookup, checkers, and reporting tools to analyze your accounts, advertising earnings, or platform performance.