IPinfo launches Host.io: Q&A with Ben Dowling

– What’s the natural story of Host.io?

We’ve always prided ourselves on being the most reliable, accurate, and in-depth source of IP address data available anywhere. We also put that same level of importance on servicing our customers.  We were working with more and more domain name data as part of our data processing for IPinfo.io. As we started to share some of the data we had with some customers, they were really excited about it and happy with having this.

We built out more data over time, and wanted to turn it into a product, so more people could benefit from it. We wanted to create a domain rank to show the most relevant results on the website, and decided to release a list of the top 10 million of those for free.

We've built Host.io and its API with developers and businesses in mind, offering important fields that other domain data API providers leave out. We’ve analyzed all the domains in the database, ranked them according to their backlinks, hosting details, domain details, and some secret sauce.

– What are the benefits of having Host.io?

Users can get a list of outbound links, backlinks, redirects, server details, or IP address details, courtesy of IPinfo.io. for any given domain within seconds. Users can now leverage these data sets and rankings for richer analytics, deeper insights, and informed data-driven decision-making. As accurate and comprehensive data becomes essential for our customers, we have made sure that Host.io is another resource and has the speed, reliability, and availability needed.

Since we were able to build this out for multiple customers and add more data over that time, Host.io is available for all to benefit to quickly and easily get information about a domain name and find other related domain names. The site collects data on every known domain name, from every TLD, and updates every month.

– What are customers now able to do?

Customers can check co-hosted domains, hosting reputation, rankings and more. It is useful for information security (cybersecurity), lead generation, SEO research and market analysis. Giora Omer, Chief Architect at Panorays, said that Host.io helped the company to confirm the security posture of domains of third parties, vendors, suppliers, and business partners to speed up the third-party security evaluation process.

– What has been the reaction to Host.io from customers?

Feedback has been awesome. Our customer, Daniel Miessler has said it’s become a key part of his cybersecurity automation stack. Another user mentioned that he’s using host.io for data enrichment and finding connections between different domains and their owners.

– What do you see as the future in adding Host.io to IPinfo?

Launching is just the start - we’ve got a lot planned!

We will continue to provide richer data, so our users can be able to find and filter domains by many more properties.  We will start to pull out trends we’re seeing across Host.io to help with market analysis. We’re also working behind the scenes to monitor changes, like new domains registered by specific companies, to get a scoop on new launch or upcoming project from a company before it’s live. Stay tuned!