Whois site

What is Whois and why is it needed

Whois (translated as «Who is» — «who is it») is a free service,
with which you can get detailed information about the domain (when it was registered, for how long,
who is its administrator, etc.).

Through our Whois-service, you can see the data of any domain, even if it is not registered in SpaceWeb.
Most often, Whois is used to check if a domain is busy, but the service has other possibilities.

How to find out who owns a domain

Sometimes users want to know who owns the site, for example, to offer the administrator the placement of advertising. It is not possible to find out the owner of a domain in the Whois service in all cases: personal data is often protected at the level of registrars or hidden according to the rules of registries.

For domains in the .ru, .su and .rf zones, the administrator’s name is indicated in the «person» field, if the domain owner is an organization, then you can see the name in the «org» field. If you do not know in whose name the domain is registered, the service allows you to contact the owner of the domain name through the feedback form.

On the Internet, you will find about 5 ways to find out where a site is hosted. But these options, except for one, may either not answer the question, or give the wrong one, which is even worse. The only reliable way to find out on which hosting a site is hosted is to determine the hosting by the ip address of the site. And at the end of the article, we analyzed several other ways to check the hosting of the site and painted why not
we recommend using them.

But enough of the lyrics. Let’s start practicing! Below is a step-by-step instruction in which we have described in detail and examined with an example how to find out on which hosting the site is.

What is Whois service used for?

First of all, Whois allows you to quickly (and free of charge) find out whether a domain is available. If the information about a domain name is not entered in the Whois and is not given in the domain check results, it means that the domain name is not occupied and most likely available for registration.

However, Whois is popular not only for checking domain’s availability — you can easily check whether a domain name is available when searching for a domain name in a domain zone. The service’s key feature is that it contains all the information about the domain, and usually provides data about the history of the domain and its owner.

Whois service terms of use

Website support and promotion

WHOIS (from the English who is — “who is it?”) — a network protocol for accessing domain registrar databases. Used to obtain registration data about domains, namely:

Online Whois Checker

The Whois service works with international domains (gTLDs — generic domains, managed by ICANN) and country code domains (ccTLDs — managed by IANA).

GTLD + New gTLD

Description of fields for domains in international and foreign national domains are presented in the «Help» section.

Terms of use of the Whois service

How to find out the current DNS of a domain

We wrote above where you can see the list of DNS servers for a domain in the Whois service. The procedure is the same as when determining hosting: you must enter the domain name in the Whois search box, after receiving the answer, find the “nserver” field. It contains the actual DNS of the domain.

How to determine website hosting by domain

You can find out on which hosting the site is hosted by the “nserver” field, which contains a list of DNS servers that support the domain. For example, the list of DNS servers for the nic.ru domain: ns5.nic.ru, ns6.nic.ru, ns9.nic.ru. This means that the site is hosted by RU-CENTER site hosting.

This is a simple, but not always reliable way to find out the hosting provider of the site. Sometimes site owners delegate the domain to free DNS servers, and the site data is stored with another hosting provider.

How to check a domain

If the domain name is taken, the basic information about it will be displayed on the page in a few seconds.
To see the full details, click on the «More Details» link. Information displayed by the system
may differ depending on the zone of the domain and its registrar.

WHY TO KNOW WHAT HOSTING THE SITE IS HOSTED ON

An interesting fact is that although there may be many reasons for this, basically there are only 4 of them:

1. To complain about the site.

Unfortunately, the world is not perfect, and the Internet is no exception. We all know that unscrupulous site owners can be found on the web, engaging in, for example, fraud, spamming or other illegal activities. In this case, the need to find out where the site is hosted appears in order to write a complaint to the hosting provider.

2. To move your site to the same hosting.

It happens that the quality of hosting your site does not suit you completely, while one of the sites you know, on the contrary, works flawlessly — quickly and stably. In this case, the need to find out where a particular site is hosted arises in order to understand exactly where it is better to transfer your site.

3. To find out hosting your own website

Although it may seem strange, but as practice shows, this is a very common phenomenon. Companies quite often entrust the maintenance of their site to third parties, and when they stop working with them, hosting data is lost, and by the time it becomes necessary to renew the domain or hosting services, it is no longer possible to find this data. Therefore, the only right decision in this case is simply to find out your hosting provider.

4. Users want to know what hosting hosted the site for the sake of interest.

What to do if the desired domain is busy

In this case, you can choose and register a similar free address.

Deciphering the meaning of fields for domains. ru,. su and

First of all, Whois allows you to quickly and free of charge find out if a domain is free. If information on a domain name is not entered in whois and is not issued in the results of a domain check, then the domain name is free and with a high degree of probability can be registered.

However, Whois is popular not only for checking a domain for occupancy, because you can also determine if a domain is free in the process of choosing a name in a domain zone. The main value of the service is that it contains all the information about the domain, and usually allows you to get data about the history of the domain and its owner.

How to find out the domain registration date, expiration date

In Whois, you can check the age of the site by the date of registration of the domain, which is indicated in the «created» field. Although the date of domain registration does not always coincide with the age of the resource, it still helps to roughly estimate when the site was created.

The “paid-till” field with the date until which the domain was paid will become important for interested domains. Accordingly, it can be called the end date of domain registration.

Checking the age and history of a domain is important not only when buying a domain name, information about the terms of domain registration is useful when making transactions, choosing partners, and simply analyzing information posted on the Internet. Fraudsters often create one-day sites with great deals, so it’s worth checking the site before buying. A newly registered domain is a good reason to doubt the purity of the intentions of the authors of the message.

How to find out the history of a domain

It is impossible to find out the history of a domain using Whois domain. There are special resources and archives for this,
with which you can make a detailed analysis and find out if there were sites on the domain before, and if so, which ones.

What can be found out through Whois

However, there are two exceptions:

Therefore, information about the domain, or rather, its registrar, in some cases may not be displayed in the service.

How to find out where a domain is registered

Using Whois, you can find information about a domain registrar. It is indicated in the «registrar» field. Sometimes data about the registrar is needed for the court, for example, if a domain dispute has arisen.

What can be checked in the Whois domain check service

The Whois service allows you to collect information about a site by domain: see the age of the domain and the date when the registration is completed, the current DNS servers, who is the registrar, and also find out whose site.

Below we analyze what data can be obtained after checking the domain in the Whois service.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO HIDE SITE HOSTING

You can. Of course you can. If the site owner does not want anyone to know what hosting his site is on, he will take all possible measures for this and, alas, it will be impossible to determine the hosting of such a site without good technical knowledge.

Fortunately, there are very, very few such sites. Therefore, the likelihood that you will find yourself in a deadlock is extremely small.

In this article, we will not consider in detail how to hide the hosting of your site, since this is a completely different story, which will require a whole article to consider, but we will still tell you about a few of the simplest ways.

RELIABLE WAY TO FIND OUT SITE HOSTING

1. Open the command line.

It may sound scary, but we assure you that it is as simple as possible and will take literally 5 minutes. In addition, the command line is the usual interface for working with a computer, only text. The same usual as, for example, the same Word or Excel, but simply without a beautiful design, and therefore text.

So, there are many ways to launch the console (this is another name for the same command line, only shorter), but we will show only one — universal, which works for all versions of Window, Linux and Mac OS operating systems.

If you have a Windows operating system installed on your computer, then to call the console, press the key with the Windows logo and the key with the Latin letter R at the same time on the keyboard (it does not matter at all whether your keyboard layout is enabled in Latin or Cyrillic). Enter the command «cmd» in the field that opens and click the «OK» button.

If the Linux operating system is installed on your computer, then to call the console, simultaneously press the «Ctrl», «Alt» keys and the key with the Latin letter «T» on the keyboard (it does not matter at all whether you have a Latin layout on keyboard is enabled or Cyrillic).

If your computer is running Mac OS, then to quickly open the console, which in Mac OS is called «Terminal», it will be most convenient for you to click on the Spotlight magnifying glass icon (it is located in the upper right corner of the screen) , enter the word «Terminal» in the search bar and double-click on the terminal icon that appears in the search results opposite the word «Programs».

In the console that opens, we write the word “ping” in Latin letters, then put a space and write the domain of the site we want to get information about. Then press the «Enter» key on the keyboard. In our case, for example, we entered the domain «korablpurga.ru».

The line «Provider» will indicate the name of the company hosting the site.

LESS RELIABLE WAYS OF DETERMINING SITE HOSTING

It is not known for what reason the Internet is full of articles, the authors of which are trying with all their might to come up with the maximum possible number of ways to find the hosting of the site, without even thinking about the fact that they often do not work. This is the case when quality suffers in pursuit of quantity.

As promised at the beginning of our article, in this section we will give as an example several other methods that we do not recommend using because of their unreliability.