Back in October 2023, I interviewed Ruurtjan Pul about nslookup.io and whatismyisp.com. One line stuck with me. When I asked how different TLDs impact perception, he said ".com is still king. I'm not launching anything on anything else anymore."
He also told me he'd love to migrate nslookup to the .com someday but couldn't justify the price. "Maybe one day ;)" was how he left it.
Fast forward to February 2026. Ruurtjan launched Wirewiki.com. He didn't migrate nslookup. He built something new and put it on a .com from day one. The man walks the walk.
What Wirewiki actually does
Most lookup tools answer one question. You type in a domain, you get back a record. Each query lives in its own little silo and you have to stitch the picture together yourself.
Wirewiki treats the internet like a connected system. You can start on a domain, jump to its nameserver, then see every other domain using that same nameserver. Click through to the IP, see what else lives there. It's the difference between looking up one book in a library and being able to walk the stacks.
At launch it includes DNS lookups, a propagation checker, SPF validation, MX records, TXT records, DNS trace, reverse DNS, and a zone transfer checker. Registrar data, hosting info, CDN details, and ASN data are on the roadmap.
If you've ever had twelve tabs open trying to figure out why an email isn't delivering, this is the tool that collapses them into one interface.
Why a domainer should care
If you do real diligence before buying a name, you want to know what's living on it now and what lived on it before. Wirewiki makes that archaeology faster. You can see the infrastructure relationships and spot whether a domain was parked, developed, or used for something you'd rather not be associated with.
If you sell to end users, understanding their existing setup is useful context before you pitch. Who hosts them. What mail provider they use. Whether it's a serious operation or a hobby project.
And this is the one I keep coming back to. A .com is still the price of admission if you want to be taken seriously. Ruurtjan grew nslookup.io to over 600,000 monthly users. He had the brand recognition and the traffic. When he sat down to build something new, he still went with the .com.
That's not nostalgia. That's someone who ran the experiment.
What it comes down to
Ruurtjan told me in 2023 that he doesn't buy expensive domains up front because he does everything himself and doesn't take outside investment. Then he built a business big enough to justify buying Wirewiki.com anyway.
That's the arc every bootstrapper hopes for. Start lean, prove the thing, then upgrade the address once the business has earned it.
If you haven't read the original interview, it reads differently now that we know how the story continued.