How to Find the Hosting Company of a Website

Having problems with a hosting provider can mean slow response times, terrible technical support, limited bandwidth, and various other inconveniences that you face when you make your living online.

That’s why you start researching, visiting blogs that perform better, and you consider switching the hosting company you’ve hired.

Now a new question comes up: How can I find out where a particular website is hosted? At first it seems hard to answer, but I assure you it’s simpler than it looks.

Thanks to the internet and the many free tools available, it’s possible to find out, more or less easily, the hosting provider of a website so you can make the switch.

I’ll show you a tool I used to use when a company put me through these problems. We’ll look at some special cases where it doesn’t show a name directly, and what you should do if that happens.

Tool to find out the hosting of a website

Who is hosting is one of the first websites to offer data about the hosting of other pages. The results it provides are so good that even other tools were born thanks to it.

It has one of the best repositories, simply because its databases are large and provide extra information even when the hosting company isn’t listed in them.

For testing, I’ll be using this website survival-ecuador.com. It’s a page hosted at miHosting, and we can use it to verify that the tool in question works perfectly.

Who is hosting this

As I mentioned before, it’s practically a reference on the internet, and you can access it by clicking here. It has been providing data about websites and their hostings for many years, so its database is huge.

The interface is friendly and intuitive, providing a search bar where you simply type the address of the page you want to examine. In my case, I’ll enter www.survival-ecuador.com.

The results show the name of the hosting provider (what we’re looking for), the IP address, the Whois (which, if clicked, displays specific details about domain management and more), and the DNS of the servers where the website is hosted.

Alternative to Who is hosting this

If you need a second opinion on Who is hosting, or just want to try another site that does the same thing, I can recommend a tool from Hostadvice, which you can access by clicking here.

It has a nice, intuitive interface, similar to that of Who is hosting. If we try entering www.survival-ecuador.com, we get very good information such as the provider’s name, the site’s IP, the number of sites hosted on that IP, the Whois information, the DNS, and a direct link to the hosting company’s page.

Difference between a hosting company and a data center

This is an important point to keep in mind. All of these websites offer clues about where your site is hosted, but they can also cause some confusion by indicating that your site is hosted with a company that is actually a data center. That’s why it’s important to look at your domain’s DNS. The DNS usually points to the company that actually sells you the hosting service.

Checking the PTR

The PTR is a record linked to an IP address. It is always a name — specifically, the name of the server that hosts your website. You can check the PTR of your domain’s IP here: https://mxtoolbox.com/ReverseLookup.aspx

Nothing — I can’t find my hosting company!

In that case, email us at ayuda@mihosting.com and we’ll try to find out which company it is for you. Our technicians have a lot of experience and will quickly tell you where your domain is hosted.