Who hosts my website?

1. Why it matters

When your site is down, slow or showing an error, the host is who can fix the building. You can lose a day calling the wrong company.

Web host

Keeps your website's files and sends them out when someone visits.

Domain registrar

Where you rent your address (YourWebsite.com) by the year. A different job, and often a different company. See who is my domain registrar?

Website builder

The tool you edit the site with. Some builders are also the host.

More on how the three fit together: domain, hosting and email.

2. Look in your own records

You or someone at your office may have set it up and forgotten. Check these first, because the host's bills and emails name it.

1. Search your email for hosting, invoice, renewal and cPanel. The sender is usually the host.
2. Look at your card or bank statements for a yearly or monthly charge that mentions hosting, a website or a domain.
3. Ask the person who built the site, or the one before them. Use the message at the end of this page.

3. Built with Squarespace, Wix or Shopify?

Then the builder is also your host, and you don't pay anyone else for hosting.

• Squarespace says all its plans include hosting for your site and its content.
• Wix says every Wix site comes with hosting built in.
• Shopify says hosting is included with your Shopify plan.

If the site is down or slow, call that builder's support. A separate hosting bill you also pay may be for something else, such as an old site or email.

4. Look it up

For anything else, a free lookup reads public records and names the company.

1. Open Who hosts this website?
2. Type your website's address and select Look it up.
3. Read the first row: Where the website is hosted. The other rows name your registrar, your DNS and your email provider, with who to call for what.

The lookup works on any website, so you can also use it on one you've just taken over.

5. When the answer is a shield

Some sites sit behind a service that speeds them up and blocks attacks, such as Cloudflare. Cloudflare says that when a record is "proxied", anyone who looks up the domain gets Cloudflare's address back instead of the real server's. So you'll see the shield, not the host behind it.

• Ask whoever set the shield up (it's often the web person) which company is behind it.
• Log in to the shield's account, if you have one. Its settings list the address of the real server, and the host's name is on your invoices.

6. Don't mix it up with your registrar

The public record for a domain name (ICANN's free lookup at lookup.icann.org) shows the registrar, the name servers and the dates. It doesn't list who hosts the site, and that is the most common mix-up.

• If the same company is your registrar and your host, you pay one bill. That's common, but not a rule.
• Name servers (the domain's address book) can belong to either, or to a third company. They hint at the host, but don't prove it.

7. Still can't find it?

• Nobody remembers. Ask your registrar who runs your name servers, and ask whoever last paid for the website. Check old emails for a welcome message from a host.
• The site was built for you. Your web person may host it on their own account. Ask them in writing, and ask for your own login.
• The lookup names a shield or a large cloud company. That is the infrastructure, not necessarily the company you pay. Ask your web person.

PageKiwi's checks sometimes miss a host or name the wrong one. If the answer looks wrong, tell us and we'll look at the check.