How to Tell Who’s Hosting Your Website?
There are plenty of reasons why you might want to know who’s hosting your website. Maybe you’ve signed up with a free hosting service and you’re curious about what platform they’re using. Maybe you’re looking for a more permanent solution and want to find out what’s the most popular web host among experts. Or, perhaps you’re interested in learning what hosting services the popular bloggers use so you can replicate their success.
Whatever the reason, you can’t make a good decision about hosting your website without first understanding who’s behind it. To that end, this article will teach you about the various ways you can find out who’s hosting your website so you can make the right choice that fits your needs. Keep reading for more information on each option.
Look At The Meta Data
The HTML head section is a perfect place to look for information about hosting your website. This is the part of the page that shows up when you load a web page, so it gets a good chunk of real estate. Take a look at the tags of Hootsuite’s homepage for example, you’ll see something like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Hootsuite is the social media marketing platform that helps businesses grow their reach on social media.” />
The tag will display on SERP’s (search engine results pages) for the keyphrases “Hootsuite” and “social media marketing”. That means that when a potential customer is searching for “Hootsuite” or “social media marketing” and happens upon this page in the SERPs, the description of the page will match what they are looking for and hopefully land them on the site.
If you’re curious about what hosting service Hootsuite is using, this is the place to find out. If they’re using a free service, you can find out what platform they’re using from the tags.
Look At The Website Footer
The website footer is located just below the website header, which is the section of the page that shows at the top and is usually reserved for copyright information and other legalities. Often times, you’ll see a small phrase that indicates the website owner followed by a link to the website.
If you have a footer on your website, you can access some important information from it. For example, you might want to display the blog address and/or the social media accounts that you’ve set up to promote your business. You can also use the footer to display the phone number or email address of the business.
Often times, business owners don’t want to reveal their business’ contact info in the header because they don’t want to appear too much like a shop. Instead, they’ll sometimes put it in a footnote or at the end of a blog post. Still, having the information in the footer doesn’t hurt. For some reason, people seem to prefer to look for business info in the footer than in the header.
Look At The “WHOIS” Record
Another place you can find important information about your website’s hosting is the “whois” record. This is a record of all the registered owners of the domain name that you are interested in. You can find out who owns the domain by going to the domain’s webpage and entering the site’s address into the address bar. If you own a.com domain, this is the place to look for the registration information.
If you’ve ever shopped at a retail store that uses a domain name, you might have noticed that when you tried to reach the store’s webpage, it would take you to the website of the registry of the domain. For example, if you searched for “Target” in the Google search bar and then clicked on the first result, you would be taken to Target’s webpage, but if you clicked on the second result, you would be taken to the webpage of NameCheap, the company that manages and registers domain names for Target.
You can use this information to gain an idea of what hosting services are popular and whether or not you should choose them based on your budget. For example, you might want to consider GoDaddy for their cheap shared hosting plans if you’re looking for a free service. Otherwise, you might want to consider Bluehost for their premium hosting plans since they offer a money back guarantee if you meet the terms of their offer.
Look At The Website’s IP Address
The IP address is the address of your computer, smartphone, or other devices that you use to connect to the Internet. Every device connected to the Internet has a unique IP address. This is basically the version of the site that you’re visiting. Once you know the IP of the site that you’re visiting, you can find out the hosting service’s name by doing a quick Google search on your device’s IP address. For example, if you wanted to know the name of the site that was hosting Hootsuite, you would enter the site’s IP address into Google’s search bar.
Sometimes, companies will hide their hosting service’s name on their websites if it’s not a proprietary name or if they don’t want to reveal it even though it’s the simplest thing to do. In those cases, you can use this method to find out the server’s name.
In some cases, you might not want to use any of the methods mentioned above. For example, if a business is hosting their website on a platform that they control and manage and don’t want to offer that information to you or anyone else, you might have to ask them directly.
There are plenty of ways to find out who’s hosting your website. Not all of them are perfect, but they’re all better than making a decision based solely on price or the promise of a free trial plan.