How To Tell Where a Website Is Hosted in 4 Simple Steps

If you’ve been locked out of a site that you haven’t used in years or you need to consolidate website management data for a large organization, then you may need to look up where a website is hosted so you can plan your next steps. This process can also be very useful for competitor research, to see which web hosts are used by others in your industry.

The publicly available WHOIS/RDAP database lists ownership and management details for every website. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to look up where a website is hosted using tools like the WHOIS/RDAP database, website IPs, and SSL certificates.

How to find a website’s host with a WHOIS lookup

WHOIS is a query and response protocol that was developed in the 1970s and 1980s, when the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was still responsible for registering all domains.[1] Today, it’s a publicly available information directory managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

WHOIS contains important details about a website’s domain registration, IP addresses, and DNS records, and it’s your first port of call when trying to identify a website’s host.

ICANN has recently begun the process of migrating domain registration details from the WHOIS database to a new protocol: the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP). RDAP stores data in a JSON format rather than free text, as used by WHOIS. This means you should use lookup tools that support both WHOIS and RDAP to give yourself the best chance of finding accurate information, from January 2025 onward.[2]

Here’s how to look up a web hosting provider using WHOIS/RDAP data:

Step 1: Find a WHOIS/RDAP lookup tool

You can access the WHOIS/RDAP data for most websites by visiting ICANN’s free lookup tool. Some country-specific domain extensions like .de and .uk are outside the direct purview of ICANN, meaning you’ll need to use a third-party tool from a provider like GoDaddy or DomainTools to find their full details.

Step 2: Enter the domain name

Once you’ve selected a reliable lookup tool, you can start by entering the domain name of the website whose hosting provider you’re trying to identify. Normally, you can just enter the actual domain name (like “example.com”) without the “http” or “www” prefix.

Step 3: Review the registration details

Typically, lookup tools will return the details of the domain’s registration date and expiration date, and information about the person or organization that paid for the registration. You’ll also get information on DNS nameservers and the IP address of the server hosting the website.

Step 4: Check the DNS records

With any luck, you won’t need to search any further beyond the nameservers listed under the domain. Nameservers are a type of DNS server that can connect a domain name to the server where the website is hosted. That means there’s a good chance that your hosting provider can be identified from its nameservers, as they’re often named in the format of ns1.hostinger.com or ns2.bluehost.com (for web hosts Hostinger and Bluehost).

If you aren’t able to identify the hosting provider from its nameservers, note down the IP address associated with the site (which will look like 12.34.567.89). You can then use the IP address to locate the company that owns the website’s servers (with more details on that below).

Additional methods for finding out where a website is hosted

There are a number of reasons why a WHOIS/RDAP lookup may not yield all the web hosting information you want. Sometimes, website owners pay for domain privacy protection to keep their registration details private. A website might also be using a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare, which routes all website traffic through the CDN’s servers for faster delivery speeds.

Here are a few additional approaches that will help tell where a website is hosted in cases like these:

Check the SSL certificate

Click on the padlock icon next to a website’s URL in your browser to access its SSL certificate. SSL is an encryption protocol designed to protect data transfer, with certificates issued to the web hosting provider, which then distributes them to websites. You’ll often find the hosting provider’s name in the “Issued To” or “Organization” field.

Run a search for the server’s IP address

With the hosting server’s IP address from a lookup search, you can use an IP address tool like IPLocation.io to identify the company that owns the server. This is usually the hosting provider itself.

Use third-party web hosting lookup services

If you’d rather not go through the trouble of looking up WHOIS/RDAP data or server IPs, you can use web hosting lookup tools like Hosting Checker or Sitechecker.pro.

They’ll return with details about a site’s web host, including the company name, server location, mail servers, and CDN. However, you’ll generally have to sign up for a paid plan after you’ve used up your free searches.

Common issues when searching for a website’s host

There are many issues that can prevent you from identifying a website’s hosting company. These can include domain privacy protection services, CDNs, reverse proxies designed to secure website details, and outdated DNS information on WHOIS records, among other factors.

Here are a few solutions that can help in these situations:

• Domain privacy protection: Domain registrars like GoDaddy and Namecheap can redact the registration details of domains for site owners who purchase privacy protection add-ons. This makes it harder to look up the hosting information for sites with WHOIS/RDAP searches, but checking a site’s IP address or SSL certificate should still work in these cases.
• Outdated DNS information: DNS records can take up to 72 hours to propagate when a website changes its hosting provider. This means that it may be harder to identify a website’s new hosting company right after it switches web hosts. Try using the SSL certificate method in this case.
• Content delivery networks (CDNs): Content delivery networks like Cloudflare optimize your site’s loading speeds by rerouting all incoming traffic through local servers for faster response times. This can make it harder to parse the hosting provider’s details from either the DNS nameservers or the IP address. SSL certificates are still a reliable method in these cases, though. Some web hosting lookup tools also have their own methods for bypassing misdirection from CDNs.

FAQs

Bottom line

Establishing where a website is hosted is straightforward in most cases. Generally, you can use any WHOIS/RDAP lookup tool to run a free search for the site’s domain on the ICANN database.

While things like domain privacy protection and CDN networks can throw a wrinkle in the process, details like server IPs and SSL certificates should help you identify the web host you’re looking for in most cases.