Find The DNS Provider For Any Website

All websites use domain names to allow us to find them. The domain name is what you type into your browser, such as adminhacks.com. Every domain has a set of DNS servers which tell the world where to find the contents for that website. If you run a website and you want to move it to a new webhosting service you will need to change the DNS. The DNS information also helps you find the owner of a website. There are lots of reasons for wanting to know the DNS provider for a website.

It is impossible to hide the DNS host for a website. The simple reason is that the rest of the Internet needs to know where the host is. If the Internet cannot find the host, then the website might as well not exist. And if the Internet can find the DNS host, then so can you.

The easiest way to find the DNS provider for a website is to log into a terminal and type

whois example.com

Where example.com is the website you are looking at. This should work on most computers, especially Apple and Linux computers. On Windows you might have some trouble running the above in your command prompt. If that is the case you can use online whois tools to find the website you are looking for.

There are a ton of free online whois lookup tools. bgp.he.net is a useful one. Doing a google search for "online whois" should give you plenty of other results.

The information you are looking for should reference "name servers". Something like this:

Name Server: lila.ns.cloudflare.com
Name Server: ray.ns.cloudflare.com

That tells us that that cloudflare is the DNS provider for this website. Now you know that if you need to change the DNS information for this site, you should contact cloudflare.