There are many times when it may be useful to look up who is hosting a website. If you’re running a web agency, it can be helpful to verify where a client has their website hosted. Fortunately it is very easy to find for the most part.
Exploring Tools to Check a Hosting Provider
There are quite a few websites you can use to check who hosts a website. It can be useful to check with a couple of the other websites if you need more details, or if the hosting provider doesn’t make sense for the inquiry you’ve received.
Who Hosts This
who-hosts-this.com is the website I personally use most for checking the web host for a given website. It’s a straightforward website that works well most of the time.
Hosting Checker
hostingchecker.com is another straightforward website that functions nearly identical to Who Hosts This, but with a few extra details. Hosting Checker is great if you need some information
Some Notes
Extra Verification
Sometimes you may learn that a website is supposed to be hosted at Network Solutions, but when you run the given domain through a web host checker, it may come up under a different name, such as Web.com.
This is where performing an IP address lookup can be really useful because it can reveal the actual web hosting provider. This leads us into IP address lookups.
IP Address Lookups
The easiest way I’ve found to check the identity of a server IP address is to use the NordVPN IP Address Lookup tool. All you have to do is enter the IP address in question (I entered 209.17.116.160, from the mysterious web.com result I received from the screenshot above), then click “Get IP Details”.
After clicking the “Get IP Details” button, it is revealed under the map that the ISP for the IP address is Network Solutions.
Cloudflare?
If you look up the web host for a website just to see that it shows that Cloudflare is hosting it… that’s likely inaccurate. Cloudflare provides a DNS service that acts as a middle man when accessing a website utilizing it. Cloudflare can help with blocking bots and DDOS attacks. However, a side-effect is that the actual web host is masked because the web traffic first goes through Cloudflare.
In order to find out the true identity of the hosting provider, you will need to dig deeper and use a tool such as completedns.com, in order to dive into the DNS history of a domain. You may need to run reverse IP lookups of the IP addresses listed to learn who they belong to (if they’re not listed).
In Conclusion
If you can’t figure out where your own website is hosted, or if you received an inquiry for a migration from a client and you want to verify the details, double checking the web hosting provider can be very helpful. Need help with your own domain or web hosting migration? Get in touch via the contact tab up top and I would be happy to help you out! Have any additional tools or tips for looking up web hosting providers that I didn’t touch on? Please drop it in the comments down below.