Who is hosting this website?

How to find out who hosts a website

Short answer: look up the IP addresses the domain points to, then the network that announces those addresses on the internet. That network’s name is the hosting company, a cloud, or the owner’s own network. If it is a CDN or proxy such as Cloudflare, the real host is hidden behind it, and DNS alone cannot reveal it.

1. 1Resolve the domain
   The checker asks our DNS resolver for the domain’s A (IPv4) and AAAA (IPv6) records, following any CNAME on the way. A CNAME to a CDN host name is already a strong hint.
2. 2Map each address to its network
   Every address belongs to a block that one autonomous system (AS) announces in BGP. The AS number and the name its operator registered say whose network answers for the site.
3. 3Check for a CDN in front
   When the network is a CDN or a reverse proxy, the result says so plainly: those addresses belong to the CDN, which fetches the pages from an origin server you cannot see.

Reading the result

The network that announces an address is the one that carries its traffic, which is not always the company that rents out the server: a small host can run its servers in a larger provider’s network, and a DDoS protection service can announce its customers’ blocks. For the holder of the block and its abuse contact, run a WHOIS lookup of the address; for the full routing record, the ASN lookup.

When a CDN hides the real host

Many sites sit behind a content delivery network or a security proxy. Their DNS points to the CDN, the CDN answers every visitor from a nearby edge server and fetches the pages from the site’s own server, the origin. The origin’s address appears nowhere in public DNS, which is part of the point: it keeps attacks and scrapers away from it. Even example.com does this: on 21 October 2026 its two A records (104.20.23.154 and 172.66.147.243, asked from a Debian 12 machine with dig against 8.8.8.8) were in Cloudflare’s address space, and its answer carried a server: cloudflare header.

Addresses in Amazon’s, Google’s or Microsoft’s cloud are shown as that cloud, with a note: the same address space holds rented servers and the cloud’s own CDN, and the address alone does not say which. A CNAME usually does.

Behind a CDN, the honest answer to “who hosts this site” is “not visible from outside”. The site’s owner knows, and the large CDNs run abuse processes that pass reports on to the hosting provider behind a site, so a complaint still reaches the right place. How a CDN works, and why sites use one, is covered in what a CDN is.

Host, registrar, DNS and mail are often four companies

“Who hosts this website” can mean four different things, and for a typical domain each can be a different company:

A domain registered at one company can use another’s name servers, point its website at a third and its mail at a fourth. Moving a website changes only the A and AAAA records; the other three stay where they are unless you move them too.

The same lookup from a terminal

Two DNS questions give the same answer by hand: the domain’s address, then Team Cymru’s mapping of that address to its AS. For an IPv4 address the four parts are reversed in the question:

dig +short A example.com                     # the addresses
dig +short CNAME www.example.com             # a CDN host name, if any
dig +short TXT 154.23.20.104.origin.asn.cymru.com
#  answers "ASN | prefix | country | registry | allocated"
dig +short TXT AS13335.asn.cymru.com         # the AS name
dig +short NS example.com                    # who runs the DNS
dig +short MX example.com                    # who receives the mail

whois on the address gives the holder of the block and its abuse contact. Without dig, the nslookup command asks the same DNS questions on Windows, and the DNS lookup does it in the browser.

Reporting a site to its host

• Find the network here, then the abuse contact of the address with the WHOIS lookup. Most address blocks name an abuse address in their registration.
• Send the full URL, the time you saw the content (with time zone) and what the problem is. A report a host can act on without asking back gets handled first.
• Behind a CDN, report to the CDN through its abuse form. It knows the origin and forwards the report.

Checking your own site after a move

After moving a site to a new server, this checker confirms the switch from outside: once the A record points to the new server, the network shown changes to the new provider’s. If it still shows the old one, the record has not changed or resolvers still hold the old answer, which the DNS propagation checker shows. The whole move, step by step, is in moving from shared hosting to a VPS, and the DNS side in pointing a domain to a VPS.

Frequently asked