Background
So you have asked someone else to set up your website and it was a long time ago. Although your website is still up, you have either stopped paying or you don’t really know where you are paying o well you pay once a year maybe in cash and you cannot remember who to. Or you just plainly don’t know. This actually happens more time than you can imagine and new web designer, developer and other such find themselves with the task of having to find what the hosting provider is for a client who generally is supposed to have the answer. To be honest, this is one of the reasons I decided to do this job, to create this business. A lot of clients don’t really get the explanation of the setup of their website, wither because they don’t want to know (it is too complicated, I trust my developer etc). But the point is that no matter how complicated things are, a person you pay to explain things to you, if they are a professional (and therefore get paid) should be able to explain the process to undergo and in a report tell you where your domain is registered, who hosts you etc so that whether or not you are interested, you can still take over, or ask someone else to, without an issue. Some professional I know would actually not go anywhere near someone who has none of that information. Others would just up their fees because it is additional work. Either way, there is a cost to a client’s business to not knowing and it has to be paid whether the information needs to be got on their behalf or the information on how to get it needs to be given. The following is a method of getting this information for yourself. However, it does not always work as the resulting information can be a dead end. It is hard to give a client a method that might not work especially since you don’t know their hosting and thereby cannot say how likely it is to work. But on a blog, I guess, there is an excuse.
So how do you do it for the few times it works?
Well what I say to clients, in spite of any doubt is first of all, try and look through your emails because the following method does not work for all and you would start being charged and because any emails you may have of the exchange with the potential hosting company would be far more accurate. Anyway, if there are no results or even search, the following is the method I follow in most of the sucessful times, which tends to work for the more known hosting providers.
- Of course, you will need to have the website address
- Now you must find the IP Address of the website…
- Use the command prompt on Windows: type cmd on your search bar
- On the Command Prompt that appears type tracert thewebsite.theextension e.g. tracert 3ewebmedia.com
- The results will have the website name followed by an IP address and a lot more data. Only the IP address is of interest to you
- To copy the ip address highlight it, then right-click on the top bar of the window not inside the window (!) and choose Edit then Copy
- Now, lookup the hosting behind the IP address…
- Go to http://www.ip-adress.com/ipaddresstolocation/
- Enter the IP address by right-clicking and choosing paste
- A lot of information appears and the one we are actually interested in is the ISP
For example,
IP Address 192.185.97.195
Decimal Representation 3233374659
ASN AS20013
City Houston
Country United States of America
Country Code US
ISP Websitewelcome.com
Latitude 29.8301° (29° 49′ 48″ N)
Longitude -95.4739° (95° 28′ 26″ W)
Organization CyrusOne LLC
Postal Code 77092
Is Private IP Address no
PTR Resource Record 192-185-97-195.unifiedlayer.com
Is Reserved IP Address no
State Texas
State Code TX
Timezone America/Chicago
Local Time 2017-10-24 11:50:51-05:00
The only issue from now on is that the name there is generally not the hosting name and this is often where the research ends because there is no real way to reconnect the name of the ISP shown and the actual hosting name as for the example above. But for more reputable companies, the transparency is there e.g.
IP Address 185.123.96.127
Decimal Representation 3111870591
ASN AS36351
City
Country United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Country Code GB
ISP SiteGround Hosting Ltd.
Latitude 51.4964° (51° 29′ 47″ N)
Longitude -0.1224° (0° 7′ 20″ W)
Organization SoftLayer Technologies
Postal Code
Is Private IP Address no
PTR Resource Record ip-185-123-96-127.siteground.com
Is Reserved IP Address no
State
State Code
Timezone
Local Time
Another example here is
IP Address 85.233.160.22
Decimal Representation 1441374230
ASN AS8622
City
Country United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Country Code GB
ISP Namesco Limited
Latitude 51.4964° (51° 29′ 47″ N)
Longitude -0.1224° (0° 7′ 20″ W)
Organization Namesco Hosting THE
Postal Code
Is Private IP Address no
PTR Resource Record fwd0.hosts.co.uk
Is Reserved IP Address no
State
State Code
Timezone
Local Time
I am not sure what the statistics are for whether or not the ISP you find shows your hosting provider as some of them use so many servers, some of which are not registered only indirectly to them (e.g. when they have resellers and so on). When it works, it is great. When it does not, the frustration stays or sometimes grows. But the information you find can be, on the positive side, a clue to a new search and Google can really ge all sorts of information once you give it the right key word.