WHOIS

Many of you will already be familiar with WHOIS, but it’s so useful for research it’s still worth pointing out. If you go to this site (or just type “whois www.example.com” in Terminal.app on a Mac) you can get the basic registration information for any website. In recent years, some owners have chosen “private” registration, which hides their details from view, but in many cases you’ll see a name, address, email and phone number for the person who registered the site.

You can also enter numerical IP addresses here and get data on the organization or individual that owns that server. This is especially handy when you’re trying to track down more information on an abusive or malicious user of a service, since most websites record an IP address for everyone who accesses them