Who's hosting this website?
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I've been trying to find a great tool to determine where websites are hosted.
Certain sites like Web Hosting Hero, or Who's Hosting This might show a site is with Bluehost, GoDaddy, or even showing the datacenter provider such as United Layer (but not the web hosting company, such as Bluehost).
When I think I have found a good, accurate tool, I test it against clients where I know who's hosting the site. But I eventually come to a client who's on, let's say GoDaddy, and it says they are on AK Web Hosting (way off).
Anyone using a reliable tool to see where a website is being hosted?
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Maybe it only knows who the authoritative name server hosts are, not the web server company?
Example:
webserver = godaddy.com
name server = hover.comHere, the @ DNS record on hover.com simply points to the IP of the web server hosting the website (godaddy).
...or some type of confusion around that.
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All the ones I've tried, it seems 100% accurate.
Example, i have a subdomain using afraid.org pointing to a web server on my VPS. It got it right: turnkeyinternet.net.
Same with my other sites using different configurations and nameservers of various places.
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Do you have a real, specific example (not hypothetical)? I think that matters a lot in this case.
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@obsolesce said in Who's hosting this website?:
Do you have a real, specific example (not hypothetical)? I think that matters a lot in this case.
Yes, two. First is a new client discovery; we're onboarding a client from another provider that has (honestly) no documentation. For one reason or another, we're going in blind; happens more often than some providers should allow it to happen. I'm big on documentation, so I want to know every single thing about the business; if we get fired, I hand over mass amounts of info to a client (haven't been fired yet, but I digress).
Second is when a junior engineer comes to me with questions about where one is at. They sometimes have a client that has multiple domains spread across registrars and sites all over the place. It normally isn't this organized under us, it's when we bring them on. They look to consolidate registrars/hosting providers/etc for better management.
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@obsolesce said in Who's hosting this website?:
Maybe it only knows who the authoritative name server hosts are, not the web server company?
Example:
webserver = godaddy.com
name server = hover.comHere, the @ DNS record on hover.com simply points to the IP of the web server hosting the website (godaddy).
...or some type of confusion around that.
Oh absolutely that's part of the issue with some tools; the verbiage can be misleading about what the tool is actually looking for. Sometimes their intended use is looking at name servers and seeing who's hosting a domain, not a web server.
Also makes it nearly impossible if a company is using a proxy, like CloudFlare.
