Hello. Nice and informative site. Will surely benefit the newbies like me. Congratulations!

Being new to this, my question is how do you find out who's really hosting your site? When we signup thru a reseller, what we see, of course, are their nameservers in the WhoIs.

Thanks.

:wavey:

welcome to WHT.

You cuold use a traceroute/ping to figure out where your site is hosted. If you use traceroute you'll get the hostname of the box returned to you and sometimes you can use that to figure out who's hosting your site.

Some hosts will use an anonymous host name, to make it a bit harder to figure out.

You can also look up the IP address of your site at whois.arin.net to find information about who's leasing the IP.

Thanks for the warm welcome.

Seems complicated to me :) But I'll try my "newbie best" to find out.

Well if you need help here's an example...

I use SamSpade.org (www.samspade.org) for most everything.

Type in whatever domain you want in the box next to "do stuff"
(i used webhostingtalk.com) and click "do stuff"

You'll see the following output:
webhostingtalk.com resolves to 69.20.37.114
This IP address is where WHT points to...

Then you'll see some WHOIS info, with Nameservers that represent the company that owns the forums, then you'll see the traceroute:

3 130.152.180.21 2.685 ms isi-1-lngw2-atm.ln.net [AS226] Los Nettos origin AS
4 4.24.4.249 7.385 ms gigabitethernet5-0.lsanca1-cr3.bbnplanet.net [AS1/AS3356] GTE Internetworking / Level 3 Communications North America
5 4.24.4.2 9.940 ms p6-0.lsanca1-cr6.bbnplanet.net [AS1/AS3356] GTE Internetworking / Level 3 Communications North America
6 4.24.5.49 7.493 ms p6-0.lsanca2-br1.bbnplanet.net [AS1/AS3356] GTE Internetworking / Level 3 Communications North America
7 64.159.4.29 9.126 ms unknown.Level3.net (Fake rDNS) [AS3356] Level 3 Communications North America
8 209.247.9.214 8.605 ms so-7-0-0.gar1.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [AS3356] Level 3 Communications North America
9 209.0.227.38 9.946 ms uunet-level3-oc48.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [AS3356] Level 3 Communications North America
10 152.63.112.42 7.683 ms 0.so-1-0-0.XL1.LAX7.ALTER.NET (Fake rDNS) [AS701] Alternet
11 152.63.2.70 8.703 ms 0.so-7-0-0.TL1.LAX2.ALTER.NET [AS701] Alternet
12 152.63.38.145 73.265 ms 0.so-4-2-0.TL1.DCA6.ALTER.NET [AS701] Alternet
13 152.63.38.70 73.899 ms 0.so-6-0-0.XL1.DCA6.ALTER.NET [AS701] Alternet
14 152.63.41.221 79.154 ms 0.so-6-0-0.GW6.DCA6.ALTER.NET [AS701] Alternet
15 157.130.73.202 72.930 ms rackspace-gw.customer.alter.net [AS701] Alternet
16 69.20.1.40 72.927 ms vlan903.core3.iad1.rackspace.com (DNS error)
17 69.20.3.19 74.161 ms aggr104a.iad1.rackspace.com (DNS error)
18 69.20.39.19 73.259 ms DNS error
19 69.20.37.114 73.490 ms DNS error


The first column is the hop - the second is the IP address of that hop, the 3rd cthe time to that hop and the fourth is the hostname. The final hop is where the website is hosted - in this case it returns a DNS error, but usually you'll see the hostname of the server the website is on :)

HTH

Very useful site/tool. Thanks.

I tried it and saw so many "DNS error" and "Fake DNS" :D

You could also plug the name in here for info:

http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.vbs.asp

Or even http://www.whois.sc/domainname.com

Just change domainname.com to the domain name of your choice without http://www

Yup, tried whois.sc also. Very helpful. Thanks.

I personally find whois.sc to be the best... it's nice to see who else is on the same box so you can have tea with the neighbours... or something:rolleyes:

Yes, found out that whois.sc is also very usefull. Thanks to you guys.