Found a great website today that is useful to the webmasters. lookupCrap.com has its tagline “‘Cause there’s crap you gotta lookup”. Yes indeed, that there are lots of craps, bad guys, dodgy companies on the big bad Internet which you need to be very careful of. lookupCrap.com cannot eliminate them, but it gives you an extra hand to work out which ones are dodgy.

To use lookupCrap.com, simply type in http://lookupcrap.com/<crap you are looking for> in your browser’s address bar. You can look up hostnames, IP addresses, US area code or phone numbers. It’ll then show you some relevant diagnostic information, and show a map (powered by Yahoo Maps) identifying the crap you are trying to lookup.

In case of IP address or hostname, it will show you the location, organisation that owns the net block, ISP, etc. It also queries major spam RBL’s whether this IP address has been black listed. In the case of domain name, it also draws the locations of DNS servers on the map.

Very neat. It clearly presents you the geographical location of the website you are looking at.

Or in the situation of looking for a web hosting company, it also shows what kind of crap they have hidden under their templated fancy website.

For example, sometimes it is difficult to find out which data centre they are using, as some don’t explicitly state that on their web pages. Most hosting companies have their main website located in the same network as their servers (or a singular “server” where they reseller account is), so it is possible to check their data centre location by looking up crap their website hostname.

Also as we have been talking about DNS hosting, lookupCrap.com also clearly presents where their name servers are — these are probably the name servers you are going to use when you sign up a shared hosting account with them. Do they look like on the same server? In the same network? Do they look like providing good redundancy?

lookupCrap.com also provides links to other free online tools like Domain Tools, Netcraft report and DNS report.

Looks like it is one great website that should be bookmarked by all webmasters who are seeking web hosting.