About DNSChkr

I'm Ishan — a software engineer and infrastructure architect. I've been building software and working with networked systems for over 20 years, from configuring Linux and Windows servers to designing full-stack applications and managing infrastructure at scale. Every hosting migration, every DNS change, every new domain setup meant the same routine: open a terminal, run dig, check the output, wait, and repeat.

After doing that thousands of times across hundreds of domains, the need for a better tool became obvious. DNSChkr puts all of those manual lookups into a single interface, and adds worldwide propagation checking so you never have to wonder whether your changes have taken effect.

The idea behind DNSChkr started over 20 years ago. I'd always wanted to build a comprehensive platform for understanding the internet — something that combined DNS tools, IP intelligence, security analysis, and domain research all in one place.

I first started working on it in 2010 under the name OriginSEO (originseo.com), which was mainly focused on SEO tools — HTTP header checkers, similar utilities. Then in 2018 I expanded the scope significantly with PageMoz (pagemoz.com). The vision was ambitious — I wanted to map the entire internet. Imagine a combination of BuiltWith, Ahrefs, Project Sonar, Censys, and a security scanner: you could look up any website and see what technologies it ran, how it ranked, what vulnerabilities it had, who hosted it, what ports were open, and everything in between. During that time I was writing articles, building tools, and creating content for the site all at once.

The problem was that I was chasing perfection. I wanted every tool finished, every article polished, every feature complete before I launched anything. I was building it all myself — the code, the content, the infrastructure — and I kept pushing the launch date further and further because nothing ever felt ready enough.

Over the last few years, my attitude toward perfection has changed a great deal. I've learned the hard way that if you wait for everything to be perfect, you never ship. The value of an MVP — getting something real into people's hands and improving it iteratively — is something I genuinely appreciate now. Launch first, or it's never going to happen.

So DNSChkr is the realization of that lesson. Rather than trying to build the entire internet encyclopedia at once, I focused on the DNS and networking tools I use every day and got them out the door. The site is growing steadily, and I'm adding to it all the time.

On the infrastructure side, the site was initially hosted on Microsoft Azure. As the project grew and I needed more control over the stack — running Elasticsearch clusters, custom SMTP servers, and multiple microservices — I migrated to a combination of AWS EC2 and Hetzner Cloud with Coolify for container orchestration. That setup gives me the flexibility to spin up new services quickly without the overhead of managed platforms, while keeping costs reasonable for a solo project.

I've been writing technical articles for over 15 years — covering DNS, networking, server administration, and security. With my background in software engineering, IT infrastructure, and network security, I've accumulated a lot of knowledge that I'm now bringing onto this site. The guides on DNS security, abuse reporting, and troubleshooting come from real incidents I've dealt with and real problems I've helped others solve over the years.

I'm steadily adding that content to DNSChkr — practical, honest articles written from experience, not marketing fluff. If something on this site helps you fix a problem or understand a concept a little better, then it's doing exactly what I built it to do.

I also write about broader technology topics on TechEarl.com, my tech blog covering software development, web development, cloud architecture, WordPress, cybersecurity, SEO, and programming tutorials. While DNSChkr focuses specifically on DNS, networking, and internet infrastructure, TechEarl covers the full spectrum of technology — from JavaScript and Python guides to cloud architecture on AWS, Google Cloud (GCP), and Azure, Linux server administration, WordPress development, and developer reference material like the regex cheat sheet and MySQL cheat sheet. If you're interested in the engineering behind the tools you see here, you'll find more of that kind of content over there.