There is lots of good comments on here, but if you are looking for the convenient list of all of the DNSStuff alternative sites I have found, please look at the followup post.
I have always been a fan of DNSStuff, in fact, I have been using it for many many years. Recently, they re-vamped their website from the familiar, no-bs, no-frills and glitz website with useful tools to a commercialized new look. When they did this, I immediately thought to myself, “Self, its only a matter of time before they start trying to monetize this.”
Sometimes I hate being right. Not long after switching their site design, they started doing this Subscription based tools, and the free tools which we loved became limited to only 1 use. Their registration process is a pain in the ass and somewhat deceiving, and logging in every time I need to use the tool is not condusive to the usefulness of the site. I can support a company trying to pay for their costs, but I think they are taking the wrong approach here.
I can deal with looking at ads, and also having a registration based login site for those that dont like ads. In fact, this might turn out more lucrative, as many of the “paying” users will still look at ads when they are in a hurry and dont want to take the time to login or look up their credentials. Forcing users to login to a site like this just pisses them off and makes them search for alternatives.
In light of all this, I have found this alternate site that has a free, no frills report that works equally as well. It is at http://www.intoDNS.com and works very well. I am happy to have found this new alternative and will continue using it, in addition to DNSStuff should they decide to alter their course.
If Arik from DNSStuff happens to read this, please put up a ads-based no-graphics and extra crap version of your tools page, even if for a limited time, to see how it works out for you. I think that with nearly 2M hits per month you will find that this keeps people happy and offsets your registrations cost, if not even more. Happy users means more traffic and more revenue. I want to push your tools, but can’t right now.
November 4th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Hello Jim,
Thank you for your interest in intodns.com.
We know that the tool looks like the original, however, would you change something right now ?
I used to like them too in the past, but right now I do not see why they need more $ to support the project. I also don’t like the tests they do anymore after discovering some wrong answers or answers like “We cannot test this because you have multiple IPs” (they only needed to compare 2 sets).
We are aware that nobody is perfect and we hope that with this tool we can convince dnsstuff to offer better services to users because they had no motivation so far.
Thank you!
November 4th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Tomoiaga,
Thanks for your very quick notice and comments on my blog in regards to the testing suite. I have updated my blog slightly after re-reading it and your comments. Please keep up the good work and keep in touch.
Jim
December 11th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Tomoiaga,
If you find wrong answers at DNSstuff.com, I urge you to contact them about it, so that it can be fixed (or they can explain why it is right, if that is the case). As for being unable to test, there are *so* many possible cases that the DNS Report has to account for that it would be nearly impossible to accommodate them all. Perhaps more work will get done on that with some money coming in. 🙂
-Scott
December 11th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
My issues of late with DNSStuff revolve around the whole logging in process and all. I find that their website is much less useful when I have to login, and a lot of the time, their whole login and cookie process is somewhat buggy. It now takes less time for me to shell to my favorite linux host and simply perform the lookups I need manually. I would have much rather dealt with ads between each box, or even those annoying linkwords for that matter.
December 13th, 2007 at 6:08 am
I agree Scott, not all the tests can be accurate as I stated in the intoDNS blog. But still, not being able to compare two arrays looked suspicious to me.
December 19th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
well, it’s a “free” world…
December 28th, 2007 at 9:22 am
I notice another site http://www.freednsinfo.com also works very well as an alternative.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:50 pm
You may try the simple site called http://www.diggip.com
January 26th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Thank you so much for the link Jim, I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. Oh how I adore this no frills Google style site.
January 28th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
By no frills, google style site, are you referring to the link or to mine? 😀 intoDNS is nice for its lack of noise, and some of the other tools the others linked are also quite nice. I try to keep my own blog similar in that it has very few cosmetics to make it easy to read, although my background picture needs to be fixed because there is a red glow around hitman that is partially clipped.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:48 pm
[…] from XP Pro 64 to CentOS 5.1 | One Bad Pixel on to Quad or not to Quad, that is the question.Jim on DNSStuff alternativeAndrew Senter on DNSStuff alternativeNasir Ghaznavi on DNSStuff alternativeMichael on DNSStuff […]
April 15th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Hello, its been a while since this was posted but i have been browsing thru google and looking @ DSNStuff alternatives & other useful query tools.
http://www.w3dt.net is a website that i have come to love, it has lots of Administrator Tools on it, and is located in Australia… Generally speaking it is quite fast (Mind you i am in Australia also).
April 16th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Dave, thanks for letting me know. I actually have a followup post to this with a set of links, so I will add it to there. I imagine that even if it is not as fast for us here in the US, that will change soon when the new 1.2Tbit link is done between Hawaii and AUS.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Hi, i wanted to report a new site i found around there. http://www.dnsqueries.com let you make every needed test on the DNS system
May 19th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Excellent! I love to see new items. I checked out the dnsqueries site and it looks pretty useful. I have updated it onto the post titled “An Alternative to DNSStuff part 2”.
July 14th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I use fixyourip.com it has a lot of the similar tools that DNSSTUFF offers and they seem to be adding more options weekly.
To bad dnsstuff has taken the road of commercialising their site, I agree with the host of this site that if DNSSTUFF wanted to make some money just throw on some advertisements in key areas. I am sure with the large volume of users the site generates this could easily pay for itself.
http://www.fixyourip.com is a good alternate to some of dnsstuff tools.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:51 am
I signed up with DNSStuff on a 21 day free trial, of their Professional Tools service only (so far as I’m aware).
My diary had a note to review the service before the 21 days was up. I hadn’t used the service past the first couple of days of the trial much as I’d found better alternatives, so I’d have certainly cancelled the subscription. However in the early hours of the final day (about 20.5 days after I started using the service) I got emails to tell me that my card had been charged not only $79 for the Professional Tools but also $42 and $99 for two other services that I wasn’t aware of.
I’ve asked DNSStuff for a refund and I’m now awaiting response.
Be careful of DNSStuff; this could be a genuine billing mistake on their part – which is sloppy – or it could be an intentional rip-off.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:12 am
I would like to think that this is a genuine billing mistake, and that hopefully it has been resolved since you reported the issue on or before 11/18. DNSStuff has historically been a good and fair company, with a good product and good people. I think that they got other investors involved or something that have making money in the forefront of their focus, as opposed to keeping the software useful. With the amount of free alternatives out there, I can’t encourage people to continue supporting DNSStuff through their poor marketing decisions, regardless of how good their products are/were.
December 24th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Here is a link to another 100% Free DNS Report Alternative:
http://www.unifiedemail.net/Tools/Configuration
Enjoy,
Dave
January 13th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Awhile ago I posted a similar article & it started quite the hefty discussion. By far the most interesting content is in the comments. Several employees of DNSstuff.com get into the mix…you should definately check it out.
Matt of eJabs
January 13th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Check out the article here!
Enjoy…
January 21st, 2009 at 8:43 am
Thanks!!!!
http://www.ger-redes.com.br
February 16th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Hi everybody, I’ve found good DNS tools (as for me). You can check it via http://mega-check.com/, moreover it is free, and I need to say that the tools from mentioned web-site are really fast and provide with the correct results.
So why we should pay to dnsstuff.com or some other similar projects, if we can use such powerfull scripts for FREE.
Please try them and give you mark, coz I think that this web-site(and those scripts) are awesome.
P.S. with help of those tools I found the hole in my nameserver 🙂
cheers
August 24th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Hello,
I’m using this website lately http://www.itsrunning.net and helps a lot to do daily checks and such.
October 25th, 2009 at 5:25 am
Hi. I am using this site to get DNS report of a given domain http://www.magic-net.nl/
June 28th, 2012 at 11:54 am
Here is another nice tool – http://www.solvedns.com
October 28th, 2013 at 7:07 am
You should also check out https://w3dt.net/ — Killer tools just like dnsstuff in the old days, multiple servers, fast, and free to stay! 🙂
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