What is HostProbe?

The Internet is full of public technical information, but much of it is surprisingly awkward to explore.

A domain has nameservers. Those nameservers are infrastructure shared by other domains. A domain resolves to one or more IP addresses. Those addresses may host one site or hundreds of others. Records change, services move, addresses disappear and infrastructure gets replaced.

Most tools let you ask one question at a time. We want to connect the answers.

That is what HostProbe is about.

A connected catalogue of Internet infrastructure

We are building HostProbe as a searchable catalogue of domains, IP addresses and DNS infrastructure.

Instead of treating a domain lookup as the end of the road, it should be the beginning. Search for a domain and you can see the addresses and nameservers we have observed. Follow an address and you can discover other domains observed there. Follow a nameserver and you can explore the domains that depend on it.

The catalogue is built from observations made by HostProbe. We record what we saw and when we saw it, rather than pretending Internet infrastructure is static.

Our first public dataset already contains hundreds of thousands of domains and tens of thousands of IP addresses and nameservers. We are now expanding that catalogue into much larger domain spaces and adding more kinds of observations.

Why build this?

Because the relationships are often more interesting than the individual records.

Knowing that a domain resolves is useful. Knowing what address it resolves to is better. Seeing which other domains we have observed on that address adds context. Over time, seeing how those relationships change becomes more useful still.

We also want HostProbe to be straightforward to explore. Public catalogue pages are intended to be permanent and linkable, so useful infrastructure information does not have to live behind a complicated workflow just to be viewed.

There is a lot more we want to add: broader coverage, historical observations, more network and server information, reachability measurements from multiple locations, and better ways to navigate the relationships between everything we discover.

We are deliberately not publishing every detail of how the probing and analysis system works. The important part is what it produces: a growing and useful map of observable Internet infrastructure.

This is an early version

HostProbe is very much under active development. Some domains have more information than others. Some data has not yet been checked. Interfaces will change, new datasets will appear, and the catalogue will become considerably larger.

That is also why we are putting it online early.

Try the search. Click through the IP addresses. Explore what is already in the catalogue. If something is confusing, broken, unexpectedly useful or obviously missing, we would genuinely like to hear about it.

Send feedback to info@hostprobe.io.

Coming soon: accounts, watchlists and submitted domain lists

We also plan to open user registration soon.

One of the first account features will be watchlists. You will be able to follow domains you care about and get more in-depth information as HostProbe observes them over time.

We also want users to be able to submit domain lists for probing. If you have a collection of domains that matters to you, HostProbe should eventually be able to accept that list, add relevant targets to the probing pipeline and make the resulting observations available through the catalogue.

Those features are still being built, so we are not promising an exact launch date yet. For now, the best way to help is simple: use HostProbe, explore the data, and tell us what you want it to do next.

This is the beginning. The catalogue gets more interesting with every domain, address and nameserver we connect.