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Thanks Jason, I appreciate it :)

Right now, it's just a glorified Dig wrapper. I'm slowly adding features that Dig is missing, like IP information (through ipinfo.io), favicons and logos.

> Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy.

Good to hear, thanks!

Maybe I should have stuck with it for longer, or just made the site better. The idea was that the official Gazelle site listed their dealers behind a postal code search form, that couldn't be indexed by search engines. So I scraped it and presented each one on a separate page, with overview pages per city. Didn't manage to get a lot of traffic, but I was also super new to SEO back then.

I think you have a pretty good idea on how SEO works. I try to do multiple things, and hope some of them bear fruit.

1. This very blog post is part of the SEO effort. A temporary influx in traffic, a couple of backlinks, and a larger following on Twitter (+80 followers from this post alone).

> The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format.

2. I've got an ex-Microsoft employee that writes content on a freelance basis. We do around one knowledge base article or blog post per month.

3. Original content that's genuinely useful and bring something new to the table (like [1]) take a lot of time, but pay off in terms of backlinks. The image by the way is release under creative commons with attribution, so I occasionally look if websites use it and ask for a backlink.

[1] https://www.nslookup.io/learning/dns-record-types/

What are you working on? Please reach out on Twitter to join our web tool makers community :) https://twitter.com/Ruurtjan

That's really cool! I'm following you on Twitter to see how you approach it :) It's a similar problem space to what I'm doing with nslookup.io, but you've chosen a different angle. Super interested to see how it works out for you.

> which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution.

100% this. I've completely moved away from trying to be novel. Pick a solution that is profitable, but you think you can improve. Execute it better and gain market share.

I run ads on nslookup.io (400 USD/month) and an API (100 USD/month). Stats are here: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io

> I understand the author probably can't reveal exact numbers

I do :) Here they are: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io Last month was exactly 400 USD from Carbon Ads. It does depend a lot on ad placement and target demographic, so your mileage may vary.

You're the second to misinterpret that, so I'll reformulate to make it clearer. I did project Euler exercises as a learning project.

If you're interested, here's how Uber solved it for their internal tooling:

https://h3geo.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PutOhe8HVNU

Thanks for the validation :) Crazy that lack of frustration can be a differentiator.

I guess you're right.. And indeed, browsers fight back: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-pro...

Internal domains generally resolve to private IP ranges, so don't do any harm when broadcasted. Besides, many people use Chrome, and who knows what they do by default with browsing history.

It's a fair point, and I've thought about this when making the stats public. There are plenty domain enumeration tools out there. DNS data is inherently public, so I don't think one should rely on it for their security model.

I can confirm. I earn about 2-3 BAT (€1.5 - €2) each month for nslookup.io (without serving Brave ads) and whoismyisp.org (with Brave ads) combined. That's ~1M page views across all browsers. Not lucrative at all ;)

I have. In fact, you can check this for any site using nslookup.io ;) (so meta) See the TXT records at https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/nslookup.io

Thanks for the offer :) I already submitted it a while ago: https://www.saashub.com/nslookup-io-alternatives

Which one? Because I explicitly added support for that and tested it.

Thanks for your kind words :)

> long term what is your goal to differentiate? or where do you want to focus?

Most other tools have clunky UX, dated design, or are painfully slow. I'm differentiating in ease of use, clarity and speed. Still a lot to be done, but I think I'm already doing okay compared to other sites.

> Other TLDs or Other Associated Domains, is this something that you would be able to find?

Since GDPR, nearly all WHOIS queries get their owner details purged. You also can't link it based on resolving IP addresses, as many sites use a shared CDN. There might be some signals left, but definitely not enough to give any kind of meaningful coverage to make it useful.

> Can you determine from a DNS search if a domain is owned by a company or by a non-corporate entity (Blog, personal)?

No, for the same reason as above. Here you could scrape the site and look for 'about' sections and do some ML, but that'd be quite involved.

> I would purchase and use this for a email verification process.

What would you like to use DNS for in email verification?

> Email format Verification As in, detect 'firstname.lastname' for 'john.doe@company.com'? There's already a SaaS that does just that: https://hunter.io/

Thank you :) Even though it's straight to the point, there's so much more to do to help people fix their DNS issues faster. I'll try not to compromise on the simplicity while adding more information.

Thank you! Nice to hear that one of my explicit design goals worked out :)

In my opinion, these kinds of tools, which you only need once in a while, need to take as little cognitive load as possible. People have something to get done, don't get in their way.

Hmm, not that I've taken a second look, I noticed that I added a hidden image hosted on their servers when I implemented the ads. It's used for counting the ad impressions, but it looks like it drops a 1-day valid cookie as well :/

> I hope that you make more than your salary

Not yet by a large margin, but it's going up slowly :)

> how did you attract users to website?

Currently, mainly through SEO. My stats are open [1], so you can see the percentage that comes in through search engines. In my case, there's a large search volume for 'nslookup', which is currently the largest chunk of traffic. An 'exact match domain' helped for sure. But in the end, Google will be able to gauge how well you're able to solve the problem that made people search for something. So an excellent product * the search volume * backlink profile * how well Google can understand what you're solving will approximate the number of users that visit your site.

You can use tools like ahrefs [2] (which also has a free tools) to get a sense of the search volume and competition on those keywords.

Hope that helps!

[1]: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io

[2]: https://ahrefs.com/

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too.

Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time.

Ads have a bad connotation, mainly because they often track users across the web. Mine don't. For WhoIsMyISP.org, I've partnered with NordVPN, and have their ads with plain `<a href=...><img /></a>`. And for NsLookup.io, I've joined the Carbon network, which also doesn't have tracking.

Hi HN!

Ruurtjan here, from NsLookup.io. I've read plenty of these kinds of blog posts, and they've been a big motivator for me to take the jump. So I thought I'd share my story here as well. Thanks everyone, for giving me the confidence to give entrepreneurship a try.

I'll hang around today to answer any questions, so ask me anything :)

I've done some search ads for https://www.nslookup.io in the early days, but I don't think it has done much. I don't track users, so I don't know if it got me any returning users. In any case, facebook's recent downtime [1] and a well-received blog post [2] brought in much more traffic.

[1] https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...

[2] https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...

Even if you disregard push vs pull, 'propagation' still implies spread through proximity. That there would be some physical or logical topology through which it spreads. So, I agree with the OP. More details argumentation here: https://www.nslookup.io/blog/dns-propagation-does-not-exist/

Exactly, that's the analogy I used to explain the core concepts of Kafka here: https://ruurtjan.medium.com/understanding-kafka-with-factori...

The article lists these reasons to pick a short or long TTL:

- Agility

- Latency

- Defense against DNS outage

- Load balancing through DNS

- The type of DNS record

Are there any other things to take into consideration?