Discover where a website is hostedincluding the location of the server and which company you contracted for this service, can be useful for several reasons.
For example: if the site has good quality of service, speed and stability, you may want to know the hosting provider in question. On the contrary, if the page is slow and unresponsive, you can analyze the company’s reputation to find out if the problem is in the quality of the hosting or in the site’s configuration itself.
The fact is, finding out about hosting a website is pretty simple — and that’s exactly what we’re here for. In the next paragraphs, we’ll teach you step-by-step how to do this search, as well as investigate other elements of any page, such as the owner and nameservers of a domain.
Come on?
Tip
Want to better understand the difference between domain and website hosting? Check out our full article on the topic.
How to Find out a Website’s Hosting
There are several websites and services you can use to find out where a website is hosted. Today, we are going to use Who is Hosting This.
To investigate the desired site, simply scroll down to the search window, paste the URL of the page in question and click the button “WhoisSearch”.
In the search result, the tool will display some information, such as the IP address of the website, the domain nameservers and a link for you to access the domain registration data.
The section you’re looking for, however, is the “Hosting Provider” section—in this section, the site will display the company responsible for hosting the site. It is also possible to check the geographic location of the servers.
Check out the example below when fetching the information about the domain wordpress.com:
Watch out for CDNs!
On the other hand, it is necessary to pay attention to a detail of the process of discovering the hosting of a website. If the page in question is using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) or Firewall, Who is Hosting This will not display the website hosting company, but the one responsible for this service.
See that, searching for the domain hostinger.com.brWho Is Hosting This indicates that the website hosting company is Cloudflare — which is not a hosting service, but a CDN.
This happens because, when using a CDN (or a Firewall), the website is protected by a security layer that masks its original IP. This causes the user to silently access a reproduction of the site’s content — not the original content.
This improves security and page speed as CDNs can have servers closer to the person’s location.
How to find out the hosting of a website if it is protected by a CDN then? In this case, the solution is to contact the CDN company directly or the person responsible for the site — and for that, the topics below may be useful.
How to Discover Other Elements of a Website
Aside from the hosting company, there are other elements of a website that you can discover with a quick search. Let’s take a look?
How to find out Register of a Domain
THE register (or registrant) of a domain is the company responsible for registering that address — that is, the company that provided services to a person (or other company) for the registration of the domain.
discover the register of a domain is relatively simple: you can use a WHOIS tool, like Hostinger’s, to get data about the company in question. In the example below, you can see that the register of the domain is Hostinger itself.
In this same search, you can find out who owns (or registrars) the domain. This can be useful if you want to get in touch with the person or company, either to find out more about hosting the website in question or to check if the domain is available for purchase.
How to Find out the Nameservers of a Domain
Following basically the same steps as above, it is also possible to discover which are the nameservers of the domain you are investigating.
When searching by domain facebook.com on Who is Hosting This, for example, these are the results:
In the “nameservers” field, we can see that Facebook uses four addresses: c.ns.facebook.com, a.ns.facebook.com, d.ns.facebook.com and b.ns.facebook.com.
Tip
Check out our full DNS article to learn more about nameserverstheir functions and how to work with them.
Conclusion
Now, you already know how to investigate the main elements of a website or a domain, in addition to better understanding the main characteristics of the server on which a page is hosted.
Let’s recap the main points below:
- Use Who is Hosting This or a similar service to find out where the webpage you want is hosted.
- On this same page, you can check out things like server location, domain registrar data, and more.
- Pay attention to possible CDNs or firewalls that are masking the actual hosting of the website.
- To find out the company that registered a given domain, use a WHOIS tool.
- To discover the nameservers of a domain, use Who is Hosting This and find the corresponding field.
Happy research!
I am a journalist in training at the Federal University of Bahia, as well as an occasional contributor to the MacMagazine website and to the cultural section of Jornal A Tarde, in Salvador. Fascinated by technology since I was a child, I created my first blog on WordPress at the age of 13 and have never stopped. In my spare time, I like to go to the movies and play with my cat, Sushi.