How to check who is hosting a website
- Enter the address, such as example.com or a full link. The checker follows redirects to the page visitors really land on.
- Read “Hosting & server location”: the server IP (a website IP lookup), the company it belongs to (the web host or CDN) and the estimated city and country, like a server location checker.
- Read the server details: server software, operating system when shown, response time, and the platform, CMS and framework detected.
- Check the security headers to see which protections the site is missing.
For the full ownership record of the server’s IP, including its address range and abuse contact, paste the IP into the IP WHOIS lookup. For all of a domain’s DNS records, use the DNS lookup.
What the server details tell you
| Result | What it means |
|---|---|
| Server IP | The address the domain points to: the site server, or the CDN edge in front of it |
| Hosted by | The company that owns that IP’s network: the hosting provider, cloud or CDN |
| Server location | Estimated city and country of that IP, the “domain location” people search for |
| Server software | Web server named in the Server header, such as nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed or IIS |
| Response time | How long the server took to answer, in milliseconds, like a ping for websites |
| Detected technology | CDN, hosting platform, CMS and framework found in the headers and HTML |
How the check works
To check the server of a website, and see what server a website is using, the tool requests the page once from our server, follows up to ten redirects, and records the response headers and the HTML. It then looks for known signatures: a cf-ray header means Cloudflare, wp-content in the HTML means WordPress, and the Server header often names the web server and sometimes its operating system.
To find the host, it resolves the domain to its IP address with public DNS and looks up which network that IP belongs to and roughly where it is. This is how any hosting checker, web host lookup or hosting provider lookup works, and why a site behind a CDN shows the CDN: the real origin server is deliberately hidden.
What the results are good for
- Finding a site’s host: answer “who hosts this site?” or “who is hosting this?” and find the website host to report abuse or a copyright problem to the hosting company, or to see which host a competitor uses.
- Security review: as an HTTP header checker and security headers check, it shows missing headers, which are quick wins, and a server that advertises an old version number is worth updating or hiding.
- Migration checks: after moving host or adding a CDN, confirm the new server is the one answering and the site server is in the right country.
- Speed checks: the website response time works like a quick way to ping a website; a slow one points to the server or hosting plan rather than the page itself.
- Redirect problems: see every hop, such as http → https → www, and remove unnecessary ones that slow the first visit.
To read the page’s full HTML, use View Page Source; for its social sharing tags, the Open Graph checker; and to see how long the domain has been registered, the domain age checker.