Reverse IP lookup

Posted by Jacob Allred on Feb 28, 2013 in Web Dev | 0 comments

I love finding new and creative websites, especially stuff that isn’t quite finished or hasn’t been released yet. One way I’ve found to do this is to do a reverse IP lookup. When I find a website I like, I punch it into a reverse IP lookup tool, and the tool tells me what else is hosted on the same server. It isn’t perfect: it doesn’t always return every domain hosted at a server and won’t work if the domain is using a CDN. Okay, so now that I’ve explained what it does, maybe an example would help show its usefulness.

For the example, I’ll use yougetsignal.com, the domain that hosts the reverse IP lookup tool that I use the most. Here are the results:

Wow, that is a lot of results! This guy has been busy! Some of these are obvious junk, like ps12861, but some look very interesting, like Increase My Vocabulary (a modern take on a dictionary site) and RentScore (a seemingly incomplete apartment search site). Even more interesting are some of the ones that don’t have anything up yet, like pagemass.com and bodyanalytics.com. I wonder what the developer had/has in mind for these?

From a developer’s perspective, this tool is a bit scary. Setting your domains up on your server while you are working on them makes it possible for competitors to get a jump start on you. They’ll know what you are working on before you are finished.

Anyways, just another neat tool you can use to come up with good ideas and to find new stuff.