Find Out Where A Website Is Hosted

Martin Brinkmann
Jul 20, 2011
Updated • Dec 11, 2012
Internet
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I just bought an expensive domain and website, and would like to share one of the things that I did to verify the seller's legitimacy. Among other things, I check a website's whois information and hosting information to make sure they match with the information in the sales letter. If they do not match, or look fishy, I walk away from a deal.

It is relatively easy to check for whois information, which may give you information about the domain's registrar, and more importantly, the name of the registrant, administrative and technical contacts. It is a good sign if those match.

But what about finding out where a website is hosted? You could look up the IP of the website and look at the company who owns that IP range, but that is rather complicated and not as speedy as the following option.

The website Who Is Hosting This offers an online service that will give you information about the company that is hosting a website. Why would you want those information? If you are like me, you'd like to verify the seller's claims. But you could also use it if you are a webmaster and stumble upon a super fast loading site, or if you want to contact the hosting company, for instance if the website in question is infringing on copyright.

who-is-hosting-this

All you need to do to find out where a website is hosted, is to enter the website's url into the form on the service's frontpage. A click on Search displays the results after a short scan on the next page.

where is a website hosted

The screen displays a thumbnail image of the website and the hosting company prominently. The latter with a link to its web page, if available.

Listed on the page are furthermore the website's IP address, name servers and links to futher details. This includes Whois lookup, DMCA Takedown and the BuiltWith website.

The whois links directly to the registrar's whois page, DMCA Takedown to a service that sets you back $99 for filing a DMCA notice, monitoring the site for removal, filing a DMCA with major search engines and preservation of the evidence trail.

Built With finally displays technical information about a website. This includes server information, advertising, analytics and tracking or frameworks used.

Who Is Hosting This is a nice to have service. It works really well for most domain lookups. I have tested it with US-based and German domains. The links to the company websites are not working all the time, especially if a parent company is listed and not the hosting company. Users can add webhost urls in this case to fix that issue, provided that they know the host. If they do not they still need to research the company on a search engine like Bing and Google for that information.

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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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