You may have a domain name for your business or yourself but you might have forgotten where it’s registered, who is hosting the website, or who is hosting email. Your domain can be split up between hosts, so knowing where to find what can be a puzzle.
With the tips here, you should be able to figure it out.
This article will cover the following:
- Do a “whois” on the domain
- Look up your DNS records
- Find out more about those IP addresses
- Find out more about who hosts your email
Step 1: Do a “whois” on the domain
The first place to always check is the “whois” (who is) record for your domain name. This lookup will tell you where the domain name is registered and where the DNS is.
Head over to lookup.icann.org and enter your domain name.
This resource is good because it clearly shows all the information you need to know:
Notice the nameservers section (this is DNS) and the registrar information.
The registrar is where you registered the domain name. In this case, it’s with Wild West Domains, which is a reseller for GoDaddy.
With the domain name servers (DNS), this is where all the records are kept saying which parts of the domain name go where. There’s a host for DNS. The host may be at the same place you registered the domain, with your hosting company, or somewhere else.
If you ever move your website to another hosting company, you need to check where DNS is hosted. If it’s hosted with your old website host, they may stop hosting your DNS for you, which will bring down your website and email.
There are sometimes tricky names for DNS hosts. For example GoDaddy uses DOMAINCONTROL.COM for their DNS hosting. Most people don’t know that DOMAINCONTROL.COM is GoDaddy. If you’re not sure who the DNS host is, then go back to the top and enter the domain name found under the nameservers to find out more about that host.
For example, if the nameservers show up as:
NS19.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS20.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Why are there 2 nameservers?
That means there are 2 nameservers – one is primary and one is secondary (a backup – in case the first one’s not available). Sometimes there are 4 or more nameservers listed but having two is usually good enough.
What you’ll do is remove the first part of the domain (the sub-domain), which is:
NS19.
and then just do a whois lookup on:
DOMAINCONTROL.COM
to find out more about who that is. Here’s how that looks:
You see here that GoDaddy is the registrant for DOMAINCONTROL.COM.
At this point, you know:
- Where the domain is registered
- Where the DNS is hosted
Step 2: Look up your DNS records
Next, let’s look at your DNS records and find out where the website and email is being hosted.
Head over to DNSChecker.org and enter your domain name.
Here’s what it looks like for tonyherman.com:
Here’s a guide on how to read this:
- The “A” record is the IP address of the website hosting
- The “MX” records define where your email is hosted
Those are the main records you need to know. The TXT records are used for validating domain ownership with different services or sometimes for certain email hosts. PTR and SRV are mainly used for some email hosting as well. And CNAME records are also for website hosting, like the “www” version of your website or other sub-domains you might have.
Now, with an IP address, you’re only getting half of the story because DNS is really for computers to turn domain names into IP addresses so they can go get what they need. So, to find out what’s really going on, you need reverse that and find out who owns the IP address block that is mentioned.
At this point, you know:
- Where the domain is registered
- Where the DNS is hosted
- The IP address of the website hosting
- The IP address or host for email
Step 3: Find out more about those IP addresses
Now, to find out more about those IP addresses, you need to do a reverse DNS lookup. Again, since DNS turns a domain into an IP address, you need to reverse that since we’re following the trail backwards.
In our example, the IP address for tonyherman.com is 34.230.210.117. Let’s head over to MXToolbox (also helpful with email-related information) and do that lookup:
The result is that it’s showing my website is hosted at:
ec2-34-230-210-117.compute-1.amazonaws.com
but that’s not actually true. In a lot of cases, this will give you the final answer but I’m using a CDN (content delivery network) called Ezoic, which helps speed up my website and they are using the Amazon Cloud to support their network. So this is a little bit of a dead end for this example (again, this often works). If you end up in this case, there may be a workaround.
If this applies to you, then go to SecurityTrails and do the same lookup in their historical DNS records.
Click on the Historical Data tab and you’ll see what info they have:
There, we can see the 67.192.51.67 IP address, which is at our host, Rackspace, and that’s where the site is actually hosted. You can set your computer’s host file to check this if you want.
At this point, you know:
- Where the domain is registered
- Where the DNS is hosted
- The IP address of the website hosting
- The IP address or host for email
- The website host
Step 4: Find out more about who hosts your email
I have a whole write up on finding out how to find your email host. Go there and read it.
At this point, you know:
- Where the domain is registered
- Where the DNS is hosted
- The IP address of the website hosting
- The IP address or host for email
- The website host
- The email host
Conclusion
Finding out where parts of your domain is being hosted can take a little work but as you can see, there are some great online tools to use to find this information. Another place to look is to whomever pays your bills because your website hosting and email hosting providers should be charging you for their services. See who you are paying is also a good way to find things out. Basically, get all the clues you can and put things together… it’s kind of like a puzzle, which can be fun – so don’t get frustrated but have fun with it.
Got comments or questions?
Ask them below or leave comments to help others – like anything I might have missed.
