Where is my WordPress Site Hosted?

Let’s say you were just given the responsibility for managing your company’s WordPress website. Congratulations! Now, one of your first tasks may be to create a new email address for the new guy. The problem is, new email accounts are created within your hosts’ Control Panel, not within WordPress’.

If you don’t have any of your hosts’ login details, you’ll need to contact them for more help. But, what do you do if you don’t even know which provider you host your WordPress website with?

Use a Whois lookup to find your host

What is a whois lookup?

A whois lookup can help you find a lot of information about your domain name. For example, it can tell you when it was registered, when it expires, and even who the owner is. In most cases, it will also show you who hosts the website.

An example whois lookup
If you've never ran a whois lookup before, the results that you get can seem pretty confusing.

How to perform a whois lookup

If you’ve never performed a whois lookup before, one of the easiest ways is to head over to https://lookup.icann.org/. Enter your domain name, and then click “Lookup”.

In this example, I was thinking of a fake company named, “Bob’s Plumbing” – and I happened to find http://www.bobsplumbingvideos.com/. If we do a whois lookup for bobsplumbingvideos.com, we can see the following:

Domain Name: BOBSPLUMBINGVIDEOS.COM
Registry Domain ID: 1705265879_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com
Updated Date: 2017-03-04T09:46:11Z
Creation Date: 2012-03-03T09:53:22Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2022-03-03T09:53:22Z
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 146
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@godaddy.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4806242505
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
Registrant Organization:
Registrant State/Province: New York
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Email: Select Contact Domain Holder link at https://www.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?domain=BOBSPLUMBINGVIDEOS.COM
Tech Email: Select Contact Domain Holder link at https://www.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?domain=BOBSPLUMBINGVIDEOS.COM
Admin Email: Select Contact Domain Holder link at https://www.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?domain=BOBSPLUMBINGVIDEOS.COM
Name Server: NS6377.HOSTGATOR.COM
Name Server: NS6378.HOSTGATOR.COM

Now that you know how to run a whois, let’s try to make some sense of it.

Nameservers

The most important part out of all this data is the “Name Server” section:

Name Server: NS6377.HOSTGATOR.COM
Name Server: NS6378.HOSTGATOR.COM

As you can see, this domain name is pointing to the nameservers as hostgator.com. In this example, the answer to, “Who hosts my WordPress Website” would be HostGator.

Registrant

If you can’t make sense of the domain’s nameservers, the whois information may contain the contact information of someone who may be able to help further. A domain’s registrant is the person who registered the domain name and owns it. This person may be able to tell you more about where your website is hosted. If they registered the domain, they may have setup the hosting too.

In a perfect world, you would see something like the following:

Registrant: Bob Smith
Registrant Email: BobS@BOBSPLUMBINGVIDEOS.COM

This would be easy to understand. Bob Smith bought the domain, and you could email him at BobS@BOBSPLUMBINGVIDEOS.COM and ask for more information as to how they setup the hosting.

Whois Privacy

In most cases, the registrant information is missing or redacted using whois privacy, as in the following two examples:

Registrant Organization:
Registrant State/Province: New York
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Email: Select Contact Domain Holder link at https://www.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?domain=BOBSPLUMBINGVIDEOS.COM

Registrant Name: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Organization: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Street: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant City: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant State/Province: CA
Registrant Postal Code: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: https://tieredaccess.com/contact/abcdefgh-5c5f-4e4b-84de-3ebf8a3d6476

When the whois information is hidden, it makes it that much harder to find any helpful information about the domain.

Use a ping and a whois lookup to find your host

You can also ping your domain name to see which server actually responds. That server will belong to your web host.

What’s a ping?
Pinging a domain is sending a small amount of data to a server, and seeing which server responds and how long it takes. We won’t get into all of the details, but pinging a domain is a common troubleshooting technique in networking.

How to ping your domain

If you’ve never pinged a domain before, an easy way to do it is to use a website such as https://ping.eu/ping/. Simply type in your domain name (without “http://”), such as, “bobsplumbingvideos.com”, and click “Go”.

In this example we can see that bobsplumbingvideos.com points to 192.254.189.254.

64 bytes from 192.254.189.254: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=148 ms
64 bytes from 192.254.189.254: icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=148 ms
64 bytes from 192.254.189.254: icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=147 ms
64 bytes from 192.254.189.254: icmp_seq=4 ttl=53 time=148 ms

If you take what we learned earlier in this article and perform a whois lookup on the IP address 192.254.189.254 (you can use https://who.is/ to run whois for an IP address), you’ll find the following:

NetRange:       192.254.128.0 - 192.254.255.255
CIDR:           192.254.128.0/17
NetName:        HGBLOCK-9
NetHandle:      NET-192-254-128-0-1
Parent:         NET192 (NET-192-0-0-0-0)
NetType:        Direct Allocation
OriginAS:
Organization:   WEBSITEWELCOME.COM (BO)
RegDate:        2013-06-11
Updated:        2013-06-11
Ref:            https://rdap.arin.net/registry/ip/192.254.128.0

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE3580-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   Abuse Department
OrgAbusePhone:  +1-713-574-5287
OrgAbuseEmail:  abuse@hostgator.com
OrgAbuseRef:    https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/ABUSE3580-ARIN

We’ll assume that HGBLOCK-9 stands for “Host Gator Block 9”. We can also see that abuse@hostgator.com is set as the OrgAbuseEmail. These two pieces of information further prove that the domain we looked up is hosted by Host Gator.