How to Find Out Who Hosts Your Website
Here’s a common scenario for those with well established local businesses which generally do the bulk of their trading offline…
Your company has a website, but it’s pretty outdated and you’re ready for something fresh that gives the right impression of your business and has a bit more functionality. Some of your options for a new site depend on your web hosting.
Or maybe the look of your site isn’t the problem at all! You’ve been hacked or the site is constantly going down which is really starting to reflect badly on your business and at the same time cause you a major headache.
We’ve been there before when we first started out and went for some super low-cost hosting that was priced that way for a reason and were hit with a lot of downtime and security issues (like hacking) causing us to jump ship. Your site becoming unreliable isn’t something you’d really expect when you sign up for a website to promote your company online is it?
In each of these cases, you’ll probably want to review your web hosting package (AKA the online space where your website files are stored online) as soon as possible and decide whether you could get a better deal.
It’s worth noting that our definition of a better deal is now based on getting more for your money rather than a lower cost as we believe you usually do get what you pay for with hosting.
We advise all our clients use our managed web hosting (or high security hosting that provides support) as it’s far too risky to invest in a website then not protect it from hackers or data loss as well as you could do.
3 Ways to Find Your Hosting Provider
Look for invoices or regular payments you pay for website services
The easiest place to start can be to look at who you’re paying (and how much). This will probably take the form of regularly email invoices or take a look at your bank accounts for a regular outgoing payment.Use a specialist web hosting look up service
We like http://www.webhostinghero.com/who-is-hosting/Check WHOIS record for name servers
Type your website (without the http:// in front) into a WHOIS service.
We use http://who.is
This service tells you who registered your website and if you look at the ‘name servers’, these often tell you the hosting company’s name as part of the name.
While you’re there, you can also see the Server which will tell you the technology your hosting uses (and you can check with a new web designer if this will be sufficient for any new website you may want)
So there you go! Finding out who your web host is can be very simple, but sometimes it can be a bit of a mystery. It’s something you definitely need to know, even if you have a technical person who manages your site, as it’s good to know your service offers what you need.
Do let us know if you know any other good ways to track down your hosting provider or if this guide helps you get a more secure, more attractive website set up.
If you’d like to find out more about signing up for our own high security managed hosting service, it’s available to you as an add-on to any new website or redesign project we take on.
