WhoIs Analyzer Pro: Review and Giveaway
Posted by Bill Weakley on 04/15/08 in Featured, Giveaways, Internet, Utilities, Web
Have you ever come up with a great domain name, and wanted to know if it’s already taken? Ever wondered who owns Internet.com? Have you tried to figure out whom to contact about the spam you keep receiving? WhoIs Analyzer Pro improves on its command-line cousin, making domain lookups easy, fast, and more useful than before.
The WhoIs protocol provides a connection to databases with information on the owner of a domain name (yahoo.com), an IP address (66.94.234.13), or an autonomous system number, or ASN (26101). Back when computer networks were new and obscure, systems administrators used WhoIs as a way to look up and contact other sysadmins. But now that there are numerous registrars, all with their own databases of domains they’ve registered for clients, using only one WhoIs database may return no information at all, or not enough information to be of any use.
Enter WhoIs Analyzer Pro, from VOSTROM. With it, you can type in a domain name, an email address, an ASN, or an IP address, and the application will automatically locate the best database and return any information it finds. This feature, known as Smart/Automatic server selection, takes care of locating the best WhoIs server for you, and is one of the most unique features of this app. You can also pick a specific WhoIs server instead, if you want to view the information one registrar has compared to another.
The main application window is clean and straightforward: Type in the domain you’re looking for (1), and select a WhoIs server if you want (2), or just let WhoIs Analyzer Pro select the best server for you. When you start the search, you get basic info on the domain (3), then more in-depth info if it’s available (4). At the bottom of the screen, you can view a log of what WhoIs Analyzer Pro is doing (5).
In addition to the Smart server feature, you can also open multiple windows and submit multiple queries simultaneously. You can search for an email address, an ASN, or a URL in addition to the more common domain name/IP address search. Once you have found the results of your queries, you can print, email a pdf, or save the results in HTML format, all from within the application. And if that isn’t reason enough to try the software, the company behind WhoIs Analyzer Pro, VOSTROM, develops solutions specifically to address network reliability and security issues. These guys know what they’re doing!
I only found two minor cosmetic issues with the application, both of which should be fixed by the next release. First, right-clicking on the toolbar brought up a blank box in the middle of the screen, for some reason; left-clicking made it disappear (1). Second, the HTML file generated from Save Result contains some non-ASCII characters, which are easily removed with BBEdit (2)–and this does not happen when printing, emailing, or saving as a PDF, only when saving and viewing the HTML. Again, both of these minor appearance issues will be fixed by the next release, according to VOSTROM.
WhoIs Analyzer Pro can be downloaded from VOSTROM’s WhoIs Analyzer website, and costs $24.95 (or if you act fast, you can still buy it from MacUpdate’s past promo link with a 20% discount). However, the generous folks at VOSTROM have offered TWO FREE LICENSES of WhoIs Analyzer Pro. Simply post a comment below with a URL, email address, IP address, or ASN that you looked up, and how the experience was for you — especially if you found out something surprising or unusual in the WhoIs information. Post between now and midnight on Tuesday, April 22nd for a chance to win!
Guest 
Article Author 
Contributor
+0 
Subscribe to MacApper's Full Page Feeds
Subscribe to MacApper's Podcast
12 Comment(s)