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Who is Hosting This, Again

February 5th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> 6 Comments

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who-is-hosting-thisBack in August of 2007, Sciencetext reported on WhoIsHostingThis, which looked like an interesting tool with which to analyze a website.

Toni Allen recently got in touch and asked if he could update readers on the latest system upgrades and to highlight the differences between WiHT and other webmaster tools. Having had some feedback that suggested their tool was not particularly reliable, I did a quick test with various domain names and found that they’ve improved accuracy considerably. Toni explains:

WhoIsHostingThis.com is a webmaster tool which tells you the hosting company for a given website. There are other online tools for researching the host behind a domain such as DomainTools, NetCraft Site Reports, Network Tools, etc.

I was going to create a fancy chart for your readers (stat & number junkies travel in similar circles as chart groupies) showing the WhoIsHostingThis features compared to NetCraft’s and DomainTool’s whois tools – but realized it wouldn’t be very useful.

The above-mentioned tools are handy for learning all sorts of technical data, whereas WhoIsHostingThis simply returns the name of the hosting company in one click. For example:

To find the name of a host via NetCraft Site Reports, you would first enter the domain, then check the netblock owner, nameservers and reverse DNS to maybe find the name of the hosting company. However, the hosting company may not be listed under any of those fields, or may show multiple host names.

Alternatively you could use DomainTools to find a domain’s host:

1. Enter the domain.
2. Then under the section titled “server data”, find the IP Address info.
3. Click the “WhoIs” link next to the IP Address.
4. Look in the displayed WhoIs info for the hosting company’s name.

Some example results searching for a host’s name:
NetCraft report for whoishostingthis.com – WhoIsHostingThis.com is hosted by Servint – but that’s not obvious using the NetCraft tool.

DomainTools whois report for templateslite.com, after finding the IP address for this domain. WhoIs info comes up as The Planet, instead of Hostgator.

One of the biggest challenges in providing accurate results is that many hosts are resellers, rent rackspace, or rent IP ranges from larger hosting companies. For example: sites hosted by HostGator appeared to be hosted by HostGator’s datacenter (The Planet).

But with recent WhoIsHostingThis upgrades, we now use several data sources including IP addresses, nameserver information plus our visitors’ feedback, to provide the most reliable results.

We also make it simple for visitors to let us know about inaccurate results via a feedback form.

This guest post is by Toni Allen from Who Is Hosting This. The site has recently relaunched, adding hosting reviews and discountcoupons alongside the tool.

Just FYI, this is not a sponsored post, I just felt that WiHT deserved the right to reply as things have moved on since initial less than positive review in 2007.

6 responses so far ↓

  • Ron // Feb 6, 2009 at 5:23 pm

    WhoIsHostingThis, is a ripoff. Tried about 15 sites and they all say the same place. Looks like they are trying to get business for their hosting company!

  • David Bradley // Feb 6, 2009 at 6:14 pm

    Really? That’s not my experience. It’s still not 100& accurate, but I’ve tried it with a dozen or so sites and got a different host for each one. You sure you’re not just testing domains on shared hosting?

  • Richard at WhoIsHostingThis.com // Feb 8, 2009 at 11:06 am

    Ron, I can assure you that the results are not skewed by any commercial relationships.

    I am guessing that the result you probably saw a few times was The Planet (who don’t host the site, BTW). The Planet provide datacentres for many, man major budget hosts, like HostGator, Site5 etc etc.

    For the majority of these, our profiles explain the relationship between the datacentre and the retail host, where appropriate. However, we do not have profiles of *every* reseller.

    Perhaps you’d be kind enough to send me examples and I will address these personally.

  • Abhishek // Feb 10, 2009 at 6:31 pm

    Hi David ,

    I have one problem regarding MySQL data , Actually I ve a wordpress site with some data and now I m switching to a new host.

    I took a backup of all of my files that I have including all post, data(s) , Images and MySQL database or in short everything by FTP and backup wizard available in cpanel. And slowly and gradually I transfered all the data to new server but now I faced a problem, how to move my sql database to new server. Is there is any short and easy way to transfer my data. As I m totally new in this field , so I dunt know anything abt hosting/transferring or related to that.

    Can u please tell me how can I move my MySql data to new one without too much effort or anything.

    File Size – 14 MB and its version –
    MySQL – 5.0.67-community

    Any more quires are welcome , but please respnd to my question and solve this one :)
    thanks
    Abhishek

  • David Bradley // Feb 10, 2009 at 6:42 pm

    On your new host, login in to your cPanel navigate to phpMyAdmin –> Import –> Browse for your backup MySQL database file, click Go (50Mb limit, so you should be okay) Good luck. Check local documentation on new host, just in case there’s any oddity with which you must comply.

  • Abhishek // Feb 11, 2009 at 4:52 am

    thanks David, by your instruction , now I m able to move up my data.. :)

    Thanks a LOT :)


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