Infrastructure - https://coindesk.com BeaverCheck Audit

C

IPv6 Readiness

Action

No IPv6 support

REVIEW

No IPv6 support

No IPv6 (AAAA) records found

IPv6 support is increasingly important for global accessibility. About 40% of internet users have IPv6 connectivity.

No IPv6 Support

About 40% of internet users have IPv6. Consider adding AAAA records.

IPv6 support is increasingly important for global accessibility. About 40% of internet users have IPv6 connectivity.

Why this matters

No AAAA records — same impact as 'no IPv6 (AAAA) records'; IPv6-preferring clients pay extra latency falling back to IPv4.

Source: Google IPv6 stats

C

URL Variants

Action

www/non-www, trailing slash, HTTP→HTTPS

REVIEW

www/non-www, trailing slash, HTTP→HTTPS

Both www and non-www versions serve content

Got: Both variants return 200 Expected: One variant 301-redirects to the other

HTTP→HTTPS redirect uses 302 instead of 301

Got: 302 temporary redirect Expected: 301 permanent redirect

www / non-www

200https://www.coindesk.com/

200https://coindesk.com/

Inconsistent — duplicate content risk

HTTP → HTTPS

308http://coindesk.com/ → https://coindesk.com/

Use 301 (permanent) instead of 302 (temporary)

B

TLS Certificate Expiry & Recommendations

85 days until leaf cert expires — 4 issues to address

REVIEW

Certificate validity

85

days left

0d 30d 60d 90d+

Recommended actions

Add includeSubDomains to the HSTS directive
Add the preload directive and submit to hstspreload.org once max-age + includeSubDomains are in place
Enable DNSSEC on your domain for DNS spoofing protection
Enable OCSP stapling on your TLS server to remove a CA roundtrip and protect user privacy

B

CDN & Delivery

Vercel

REVIEW

Vercel

Site is served via Vercel CDN

Got: x-vercel-id: gru1::4df2z-1776802196887-605616411c36

CDN Detected: Vercel

Provider Vercel Evidence x-vercel-id: gru1::4df2z-1776802196887-605616411c36

A+

DNS Records

1 A records, 12 ms lookup

PASS

1 A records, 12 ms lookup

Resolves to 1 IPv4 address(es)

Got: 76.76.21.21

Single A record — no DNS redundancy

Multiple A records provide failover if one server goes down.

No IPv6 (AAAA) records

2 nameserver(s) configured

Got: brit.ns.cloudflare.com, elmo.ns.cloudflare.com

2 mail exchanger(s) configured

CAA records not checked

CAA record lookup requires a specialized DNS resolver. This check will be available in a future update.

SPF record present in TXT

DNS resolution time: 12 ms

Got: 12 ms

A	76.76.21.21
AAAA	—
CNAME	—
NS	brit.ns.cloudflare.com, elmo.ns.cloudflare.com
MX	10 mxb-00494701.gslb.pphosted.com 10 mxa-00494701.gslb.pphosted.com
TXT	MS=ms80632809 ZOOM_verify_W2KoA5kI0BrIXUHNyho8A1 anthropic-domain-verification-0hr5gw=6y8gxpykMd1IR254bY0GIKhGp apple-domain-verification=UxQhWSLPh5l3CAuM atlassian-domain-verification=SIGNKsJC2IOncTvXi4zxXUFZKCG8EiPd+nRbLekwWdQi8e5Bmk... atlassian-sending-domain-verification=64e3df99-8611-44e1-bc69-7d4f92c3c163 brave-ledger-verification=25d86701b45194e580aad7e4e8e97aa654dde8980410a294c9c304... canva-site-verification=2MhwYeNKU2cYhgugxMXRdQ canva-site-verification=aj1SylxEhbGk5VAm7YcGHA docusign=0a24f9ab-fdcd-4cca-890c-c3ede64b386c facebook-domain-verification=jethcavls9785u9by2mj1cpk1u5v4b google-site-verification=0klvrrEVSMWwcn2sED3HnGrMh-RCpyLpRxadMUehlQQ google-site-verification=Vzh7kbYkLG1N-lLgpahVYyBEmUp4L5L8LCXxP0Rv-TQ google-site-verification=Zp_hdVKv_cWseyZ3dBp34SX2NDNe7lQkObyehSj0ozw google-site-verification=dnuf9st63zfKTXHuzCgkR4e3_c6VMQBCPYSkWb82q2M keybase-site-verification=03MWFO7k7EuqCZlh6Nl1vkoH0LfklfBSEXAz8IXNi5k knowbe4-site-verification=9d99f212606d1a8ecdf0de231aaccd4f maestro-cloud-domain-verification-xgc0z3=Taf6yu09rM0n95hE8KZDTGv5s mandrill_verify.tbITbsnwlEoa3b1MmXTt7Q postman-domain-verification=d11c0dd86335c62d7dea01461910c38d0266157fdaf5f989e2ff... slack-domain-verification=ZJo1Mdc6IQApH9YR3UHb9mIJhiVA6gWkQhvN8to9 stripe-verification=6913966D81228BDC72530828D979B918F1A77314C68AF5970465CBD2984F... SPF v=spf1 include:_spf.atlassian.net include:_spf.google.com include:amazonses.com ... yahoo-verification-key=v0bDFhS9RbcVhJltpzeKTGfOusp4222M/TGP3c3byqo=
CAA	Lookup not available with standard resolver

Resolved in 12 ms

Multiple A records provide failover if one server goes down.

Why this matters

Single A record means a single point of failure — if that IP goes down, your site is unreachable until DNS TTL expires.

Learn more ▾

Add multiple A records for round-robin failover, or use a managed DNS provider with health-checked failover (Route 53, Cloudflare, NS1). Short TTL (60-300s) lets clients recover faster on outages.

Source: SRE practice / DNS architecture

CAA record lookup requires a specialized DNS resolver. This check will be available in a future update.

Why this matters

Informational: CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) records weren't checked in this scan.

A

Redirect Chain

1 redirect(s), 508 ms total

PASS

1 redirect(s), 508 ms total

Single redirect

Got: https://coindesk.com → https://www.coindesk.com/ (308)

WWW normalization redirect

Redirect overhead: 508 ms total

Got: 508 ms

https://coindesk.com

30 ms · HTTP/1.1

308

https://www.coindesk.com/

479 ms · HTTP/1.1 FINAL

#	URL	Status	Time	Protocol	Server
1	https://coindesk.com	308	30 ms	HTTP/1.1	Vercel
2	https://www.coindesk.com/	200	479 ms	HTTP/1.1	cloudflare

See the visual redirect chain in the HTTP Probe tab →

A+

Crawlability

robots.txt present, sitemap with 78 URLs

PASS

robots.txt present, sitemap with 78 URLs

robots.txt is present

Got: 2495 bytes

sitemap.xml is present

sitemap.xml is valid XML

sitemap.xml contains 78 entries

Sitemap index with 78 child sitemaps

robots.txt references sitemap

robots.txt 200 OK

Size 2495 B Sitemaps referenced 4 User-agents meta-externalagent, omgili, Quora-Bot, Scrapy, TurnitinBot, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, PerplexityBot, *, anthropic-ai, CCBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, DataForSeoBot, Diffbot, omgilibot, Amazonbot, cohere-ai, FacebookBot, FriendlyCrawler, Google-Extended, GPTBot, Meta-ExternalAgent Blocking No — crawling allowed

User-agent: *
Allow: 
Disallow: /pf/api/v3/*
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /_vercel/
Disallow: /exchange-api/
Disallow: /?t=
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /?q=
Disallow: /search?q=
Disallow: /search?s=
Disallow: /auth/login
Disallow: /auth/*
Disallow: /layer2/
Disallow: /consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /*/amp

Disallow: /es/layer2/
Disallow: /es/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /uk/layer2/
Disallow: /uk/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /ru/layer2/
Disallow: /ru/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /fil/layer2/
Disallow: /fil/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /it/layer2/
Disallow: /it/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /fr/layer2/
Disallow: /fr/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /pt-br/layer2/
Disallow: /pt-br/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /de/layer2/
Disallow: /de/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /nl/layer2/
Disallow: /nl/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /ko/layer2/
Disallow: /ko/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /zh/layer2/
Disallow: /zh/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /tr/layer2/
Disallow: /tr/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /id/layer2/
Disallow: /id/consensus-magazine/
Disallow: /ja/layer2/
Disallow: /ja/consensus-magazine/

# AI Allow/Disallow Rules

User-agent: Amazonbot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bytespider
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: Claude-Web
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: cohere-ai
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: DataForSeoBot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: Diffbot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: FacebookBot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: FriendlyCrawler
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
User-agent: meta-externalagent
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: omgili
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: omgilibot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: Quora-Bot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: Scrapy
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

User-agent: TurnitinBot
Allow: /price/
Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://www.coindesk.com/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap: https://www.coindesk.com/arc/outboundfeeds/news-sitemap-index
Sitemap: https://www.coindesk.com/arc/outboundfeeds/news-sitemap-index-es
Sitemap: https://www.coindesk.com/arc/outboundfeeds/video-sitemap

sitemap.xml 200 OK

Type Sitemap Index URLs 78 entries Valid XML Yes

Child Sitemaps:

A+

Domain Intelligence

coindesk.com — via MarkMonitor Inc., 18 years, 2 months old, hosted on AWS

PASS

coindesk.com — via MarkMonitor Inc., 18 years, 2 months old, hosted on AWS

Domain registered until May 4, 2027 (1 years remaining)

DNSSEC is not enabled

DNSSEC protects against DNS spoofing attacks. While not required, enabling DNSSEC adds an additional layer of security. Contact your DNS provider to enable it.

Registrar: MarkMonitor Inc.

Registrar lock is NOT enabled

The domain can be transferred without an unlock step. Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) in your registrar's control panel to protect against unauthorized or accidental transfers.

Hosting: AWS

Got: AS16509

Domain expiry

323 days

May 4, 2027

SSL certificate

85 days

Issued by Let's Encrypt

Domain age

18 years, 2 months

Registered May 4, 2008

DNSSEC

Not enabled

Protects against DNS spoofing

Hosting

AWS

ASN AS16509

76.76.21.21

Registrar

MarkMonitor Inc.

Unlocked 2 NS records

Expiry timeline

Today

+1 year

Domain expiry SSL expiry Danger zone (≤30 days)

Recommended actions

Enable DNSSEC to protect visitors from DNS spoofing
Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) to block unauthorized domain transfers

Registrar MarkMonitor Inc.

Created May 4, 2008 (18 years, 2 months ago)

Expires May 4, 2027 (1 years)

Last Updated September 29, 2025

Name Servers brit.ns.cloudflare.com, elmo.ns.cloudflare.com

DNSSEC Not enabled

Hosting

IP Address 76.76.21.21

ASN AS16509 (AMAZON-02 - Amazon.com, Inc., US)

Provider AWS

Data source: rdap (0.6s)

DNSSEC protects against DNS spoofing attacks. While not required, enabling DNSSEC adds an additional layer of security. Contact your DNS provider to enable it.

Why this matters

Without DNSSEC, an attacker who can poison your DNS can hijack your domain — and SSL certs alone don't stop them.

Learn more ▾

DNSSEC adds cryptographic signatures to DNS records, preventing forged responses from poisoning resolver caches. Without it, an attacker who controls the network path can redirect your domain to a malicious server before any HTTPS handshake happens. Most modern registrars (Cloudflare, Google Domains, Route 53) enable it with one toggle.

Source: ICANN / RFC 4033

The domain can be transferred without an unlock step. Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) in your registrar's control panel to protect against unauthorized or accidental transfers.

Why this matters

Without registrar lock, an attacker who phishes your registrar credentials can transfer the domain in minutes — total brand hijack.

Learn more ▾

Registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited, clientDeleteProhibited) requires extra verification before any transfer/update/delete. Every major registrar offers it free. Combined with 2FA on your registrar account, it's the strongest defense against domain hijacking.

Source: ICANN / domain-security best practice

A+

HTTP Probe Timing

Total 30 ms — DNS, TCP, TLS, TTFB, content transfer breakdown

PASS

DNS Lookup

4 ms

TCP Connect

1 ms

TLS Handshake

5 ms

Time to First Byte

31 ms

Total Time

31 ms

Connection waterfall

DNS Lookup 4 ms TCP Connect 1 ms TLS Handshake 5 ms Server Processing 19 ms Content Transfer 0 ms