here ;

Looks cool! I don't think the 10 credits thing works yet though...

I've set it to 30 for now, will be back to ten soon.

It gonna come back down again, another bug found. :(

Being the unique person that I am I seem to have a unique problem. I emailed you about it Matt

Although I would love to have 2381 customers I really only have about 140 at the moment ):

Although I would love to have 2381 customers I really only have about 140 at the moment ):

Let me guess. Your site doesn't have its own name servers, so the results are coming from your parent host?? :)

My suggestion

Allow a host to have there info blacklisted or not involved in lookups. I understand it is public information, but the return on actual hosted sites can be abused and farmed. Even if it is 100 at a time. This could cause a problem for you if someone abuses it and that host *loses* business from it. Just my 2 on this.

Originally posted by UmBillyCord
My suggestion

Allow a host to have there info blacklisted or not involved in lookups. I understand it is public information, but the return on actual hosted sites can be abused and farmed. Even if it is 100 at a time. This could cause a problem for you if someone abuses it and that host *loses* business from it. Just my 2 on this.
I agree with this. Although I think public information should remain public and all, this kind of harvesting opens the door to competitors spamming other host's clients trying to get them to switch. This is highly frowned upon, sure, but look at some of the threads in WHT where big companies have spammed people trying to get business.

All the spammers have to do is send emails to info@domain.com and if that customer has a catch-all account set up, it goes through. Also, this could leave the door open to competitors spamming their clients with non-sense just because they don't like the competition. They could find some open relay somewhere and start flooding mail boxes.

I don' t know, I could probably think of more harm-than-good that can come from a system like this available to just anyone who signs up with WHT.

Actually, I can't think of any good that comes from HostSpy. So a potential customer looks up the nameservers that a host is known to use and looks at how many domains they have hosted. This reflect nothing on how many actual customers they have -- they could have 1,000 pointers. Whoopdie-doo. The only "good" I see from it is hosts looking up their competitor's nameservers and taking a peek... and even that is pretty lame, IMO.

Maybe someone can tell me what someone would actually want to use this for and how accurate the data "really" is for the purposes of that reason.

Originally posted by UmBillyCord


Let me guess. Your site doesn't have its own name servers, so the results are coming from your parent host?? :)

No, but the darn program took my secondary nameserver @ backupdns.com and used that information.

Backupdns is for off-site dns and I am just one of their clients.

Matt Fixed it though :)

Who says this is public information? It's not!

Especially if a host states in their TOS that all their (your client) information will be kept strictly confidential and not disclosed to the public and or sold to third parties, blah blah blah...

What then?

Originally posted by Dylan
Who says this is public information? It's not!
Where is WHT pulling the data from? You can easily find out information about a domain (www.domainwhitepages.com), so why not domains that use a specific nameserver? I don't see any reason for it to be private or confidential, but I also don't see a reason for HostSpy.

Originally posted by Dylan
Who says this is public information? It's not!

Especially if a host states in their TOS that all their (your client) information will be kept strictly confidential and not disclosed to the public and or sold to third parties, blah blah blah...

What then?

This has nothing to do with a hosts TOS. The information is publicly available. Do a whois search on any domain and youcan see the nameservers. What this is doing is basically a reverse lookup. It looks at the nameserver and gives you the domain. All of this is public information and has nothing to do with the host.

Just for my penny, Matt, it is an open door for a lawsuit. Even though the information is public, it is being assemble in such a way that it could be very damaging. I am not an attorney, but I can see that this can be potentially disasterous.

Maybe someone can tell me what someone would actually want to use this for and how accurate the data "really" is for the purposes of that reason.


To verify to a certain extent that a hosts claim of hosting 10,000 domains is actually true. Whilst it is obvious the accuracy in the results vary, it does generally provide a rough guide, and its easy to tell where the mistake "lies" between 500 and 10,000.

Also because the majority of hosts are [insert word of choice here]. How many web hosting companies are there? Millions. How many claim to own their own NOC, transit, have their own staff on-site blah blah blah etc...? How many times have you been lead to believe companies are multi-million outfits with offices etc... only later to find out its a 1 man business, which despite what the site claims he has no control over the transit, location, uptime etc.. of the server. Now for a company to have their own NOC I'd say they need to host a least 1000 domains, for a company to employee 10 fulltime people staff I'd say at least 10,000 domains etc...

Some companies also host their own sites on a super fast server and clients on slow servers, by showing a selection of domains visitors can do their own homework, some even host them on different networks.

With regards to privacy, there's a lot less information being displayed than in a WHOIS record.

With regards to spam, you can get e-mail anyway. If I wanted to spam site owner I'd just open up my history folder and e-mail info@anysitevisited. Or scan google.com,the whois db, or any other search engine.

WeinBar, sorry, I wasn't referring to whois info.

Let's take this for example: most hosts will not provide a list of domain names they host to potential clients unless the domain owner agrees to it.

I've disabled the display of the first 100 or so domains, for now HostSpy just displays the number of domains hosted by (a) specific nameserver(s). (killing the server anyway)

I've disabled the display of the first 100 or so domains, for now HostSpy just displays the number of domains hosted by (a) specific nameserver(s). (killing the server anyway)

This was wise. As weinbar said, you would be open for suit. Especially if you provide a way for a scum bag to harvest, then spam another hosts customers - which could cause lose of business.

With regards to spam, you can get e-mail anyway. If I wanted to spam site owner I'd just open up my history folder and e-mail info@anysitevisited. Or scan google.com,the whois db, or any other search engine.

The point is, lets say I have something against abc host. I can just come here, submit the name server, get the spidered results, and then create a script to spam them. If I really did not like them, I would keep doing it. Because the results are always different. It is not the same 100.