DNS Zone Analysis

The DNS Zone is the root of all websites, email and other services. The Zone tells clients (browsers) and servers where to find the servers to handle the given request. Taking something simple like website hosting, the domain www.gensupport.net is defined in the Zone to point to a specific server who is responsible for handling website requests. Diagnosing issues with the Zone can be time consuming but this tool is designed to help track down the most common issues for you. Even if your Zone works great, having a dump of the key records can help in seeing possible issues that need action.

Name Servers

Your DNS Zone is hosted on one or more name servers and these should be disparately hosted so as to provide resiliance. We will check where your Zone is hosted and verify the name servers are reachable and the zone is setup correctly to reference them.

Forward and Reverse DNS

One issue that continues to persist even today is incorrect setup of reverse DNS and this can cause a multitude of issues when interoperating with other servers who check proper configuration. The rule has always been (for proper email providers) that DNS Setup is checked as standard before accepting any connection. Having incorrect Reverse DNS can cause email non-delivery as well as intermittent issues with certificate authorities, proxies, caches, and CDN's. We check both forward and reverse setup.

Email Configuration

Correct Email Server Configuration will save you a heap of problems, especially with non-delivery or lost in transit errors. This tool will test your email configuration and send 'test' email's to postmaster accounts showing the conversation with your server to help you track down issues. We also check blacklisting and other detriments automatically.

Email technologies such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DMARC are key players in reducing spam and protecting your email systems from abuse, and we'll test for these and verify their configuration. Outputting both the row configuration information as seen together with links to documentation and recommendations.

Blacklists and RBL's

Internet blacklists are often utilised to prevent network borne attacks and spam/viruses. There are blacklists specific to email, blacklsiting host servers, domain names and content, and domain blacklists for websites. We will check both of these for you automatically and highlight any blacklists that list you as well as providing links to that blacklist so you can take action.

Server Verification

Each Server that deals with your internet presence will offer a number of services to the Internet. When your services are hosted with an Internet Service Provider then this will all be setup correctly, but if your trying a DIY approach then making sure intranet hosts are made available to the public internet can be challenging and we'll check the reachability of each server together with the ports.

SSL Certificates

There is a definate advantage today in having a SSL Certificate on your site, and with some organisations providing these free of charge its a must have. We will check there is an SSL certificate on your site and also check the details of that certificate for you.

Website Configuration

Setting up a website is fairly easy these days, but ensuring the web server hosting that site, as well as the site iself is optimum takes more effort. Our tool will check not only your webserver, but the headers and content served by your site for validity, ommissions, adverse inclusions and security risks. With each test we provide links directly to the documentation to help. We will also check if your site is using HTTP 1.0, HTTP 1.1 or HTTP/2.

We will further check who actually hosts your website physically, as well as identify the network owners and operators. We will attempt to retrieve whois information for your domain name but this is not always successful, which in itself can be a concern.

We will retrieve and list all your meta data from the homepage including Google and Facebook Opengraph tags.

Website Scrape and Rankings

We will scrape (read) your site and try to identify the software used to create it such as Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, Wix etc. We will then check for key ranking factors against MOZ and ALEXA to give you your Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), MOZ Rank and Alexa Rankings.

Results

When the testing tool has finished its work, the results are made available online (should you wish to send them to anyone, for example your ISP) and also technical details are made avaialble as a download again for your Technical Department or ISP.