Finding which Web hosting company hosts a Web site

In some circumstances, you may want to find out which hosting company host a specific Web site. By using the combination of 3 NirSoft tools - IPNetInfo, DNSDataView, and WhoisThisDomain - you can find out the hosting company of a Web site, in most cases:

  1. Usually, the hosting company owns the IP addresses that are used for the hosted Web sites. This means that you can find out the details of the hosting company by retrieving the owner of the Web site IP address. you can easily do that by using IPNetInfo utility:
    Download and run IIPNetInfo, and in the addresses text-box, type the address of the Web site (For example: www.nirsoft.net). Also, verify that the 'Convert host names to IP addresses' option is selected.


    Click 'OK' and then wait until the IP address information is retrieved from the WHOIS server.

    In the above example, the displayed owner is 'Jaguar Technologies LLC' which is really the current hosting company of nirsoft.net
    However, some hosting companies don't use their own IP addresses, but instead they use IP addresses own by a larger company. If you suspect that this is the case, you have to continue to step no. 2

  2. When a Web site is hosted in a shared hosting account, the name servers are usually owned by the hosting company. This means that the name servers of a domain may imply who is the hosting company. However, be aware that some Web site owners use a standalone DNS service which is separated from the hosting company. In such cases, the DNS records won't show you the name of the hosting company, but the name of the DNS company.

    In order to retrieve the name servers (NS records) of a domain, you can use the NSLookup tool that comes with Windows, or DNSDataView tool of NirSoft. In 'Select Domains' window of DNSDataView, type the desired domain, and verify that the 'NS' option is checked. Click 'Ok', and wait a few seconds until the NS records are retrieved and displayed. Look in the NS records and try to figure out whether it contains the name of the hosting company. For example: if the name server is ns5.hostgator.com, this means that the site is probably Hosted by HostGator company. To get the details about the company owned the name server, you can use my third tool - WhoisThisDomain. In the 'Choose Domains' window of WhoisThisDomain utility, type only the domain name (In our example - You should type only the 'hostgator.com' without the 'ns5' which is the host name) Click 'Ok' and wait a few seconds to retrieve the WHOIS information. After that, you should get the details of the company in the main window of WhoisThisDomain: