Whether you have a website developer looking after your site and Web hosting or a whole IT department taking care of your technical infrastructure, domain name system monitoring and understanding DNS issues are important parts of maintaining your online presence.

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A domain name system is a database system that translates a computer’s fully qualified domain name into an IP address. Each organization that maintains a computer network will have at least one server handling DNS queries. That server, called a name server, will hold a list of all the IP addresses within its network, plus a cache of IP addresses for recently accessed computers outside the network. A good analogy is to think of DNS as an electronic telephone book for a computer network. If you know the name of the computer in question, the name server will look up its IP address.

DNSstuff (dnsstuff.com) says it offers tons of value for tech professionals with troubleshooting, solving and understanding DNS issues through its portfolio of over 45 proprietary tools; the results offer diagnostic data to maintain, configure and resolve DNS and network configuration issues.

DNSstuff offers a selection of tools under certain categories like Domain, IP and Hostname as well as other general categories like CSE HTML Validator that helps locate html errors in websites and Email Test that determines problems with sending mail to a user or domain.

One of the main tools highlighted on the website is DNSreport, which provides comprehensive information about specified domains that can verify your DNS health and identify problems or issues. Some of the other main tools include WHOIS Lookup, which finds contact information for the owner of a specified domain or hostname, Reverse DNS, which determines the hostname associated with a specified IP address, DNS Timing, which checks the DNS server response times and provides a score, including the description of any issues encountered, as well as Spam Database Lookup, which determines whether the specified IP address is listed on known spam databases.

You can sign up for single-user memberships starting at $36 per year, or you can look into a corporate account for multi-user access. DNSstuff also offers a free trial where you can test 30 lookup tools.

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