EnterraHost
What the team has done
Between us there is somewhere between 5 and 35 years of experience in the industry. That work has ranged from deploying ISP transmission networks to building and running hosting networks, and it has covered programming, switching and routing along the way. Different people, different decades, and a fair amount of overlap in the middle.
What we run
Linux and FreeBSD, both since before Red Hat 5 and before FreeBSD 5. Draw your own conclusions about the average age in the room. Some of us are older than others, grayer than others, and on a Monday morning, grumpier than others.
Why that matters in a guide
A support article is worth reading when it tells you the thing that is not in the manual. The DNS record that looks correct and does not resolve. The tag that is in the page but not in the HTML the crawler actually receives. The hop that shows a large number while forwarding perfectly well. Those answers come from having hit them, not from having read about them.
When a guide here says a silent hop is normal, or that an expired certificate is what is stopping a crawler, it is because somebody on this team spent an afternoon on exactly that before writing a word about it.
Where the free tools fit in
The checks on this site are the same infrastructure the team runs, opened up. A trace from Cape Town or St Louis is answered by the same regions that serve hosting, so what you measure is the network a site would really use. The tools page lists all of them, and none of them needs an account.
The guides that explain what the output means are in the knowledge base, sorted by product.