Please review our DNS Propagation Checker

Hi,

any feedback on our new Global DNS Propagation Checker tool will be highly appreciated. The tool itself is quite simple - it checks whether (a change in) a DNS zone is fully propagated. It works with over 30 servers all over the world. It displays all different versions of the record that were detected in the DNS system and tells you which DNS servers see which version.

 

That's a pretty neat tool and website you have there. The ad placement feels a little weird to me. I think you should push the content over to the left and remove that banner ad on that side of the page. It's feeling very crowded right now because of that.

Also, you should think about who your audience is going to be with this tool and maybe do some affiliate links to tech products and services. I see an advert for an MBA from a college, but it would be neat if that was an online masters in computer science or something a bit more relevant to your audience here. I did a see a linode ad while I was browsing around the site, you should check out digitalocean as they have a pretty good affiliate program (and are just a good company).

The layout on some of the tools results could use some better formatting. The design itself feels a bit cramped. Would be nicer to see a bit larger fonts and some more whitespace. It could also just be the ads though.

As an aside, are you worried about offering nmap scans from your VPS? That seems like it could get that IP in trouble rather quickly. Also seems like it's ripe for abuse from script kiddies and the like.

Nice job! Best of luck to you!

 

Hi Scott, thank you very much for your feedback. My intention was to ask about this particular tool we have just introduced, but I am also happy to receive feedback about the whole site.

As for ads and their placement - this was a huge topic (and kind of still is) about a year ago. We started with completely different placement of ads and we were earning something from that that we were not really happy about. So we decided to go with A/B testing and created 10 different layouts. This one that you can see one the page now is the result, it was simply the most successful layout from all 10 we tried and it increased our revenues from ads by 300 % (yes, really +300 %). Yes, I am aware of the fact that the ads might be unpleasant for the users. This is why we allow users to take them down. If they register a free account with us, they can switch them off in the settings.

We have tried affiliates, but never succeeded there. AdSense always outperformed affiliates we tried by a mile. And we tried CJ, we tried ClickBank, we tried direct affiliates. We probably never found affiliate that would fit to our users (they are web devs, web owners, IT staff from all kinds of companies, online entrepreneurs). We are trying to find partners all the time (see my signature), but it is hard.

As for the Nmap - actually no, it is no problem at all. In fact, it was the original project nmap-online.com that ODT developed from. So we are providing online Nmap for about 7 years now, while ODT itself is like 3 years old. Why it is not a problem? Because we only allow you to scan machines within your /24 subnet (C class network). With this limitation, you should not have a problem for legitimate use (test your company's servers, your network firewall etc.) and you are limited to scan what is not yours or nearby. We rarely receive a complaint and if we do, it turns out that one employee scans the machine and other one detects it and they did not communicate with each other ...

As for the design - yes, unfortunately, the design is not very modern and has its glitches and we are aware of it, but unable to do much about it at the moment.

Thanks!