Hosting Checker - How to find out where the website is hosted via Terminal?
Tags: terminal, security, webdev, beginners
Published: 2023-05-03 20:40:08

It can be some basic background check or a serious need to identify what hosting is used for certain web services. It can be practical to identify why is a certain website so quick to load or try to decide what hosting service will be best for a similar online service you have found.

There is tons of online service that claim to detect the hosting service of a particular website. Mostly named "hosting checkers". But you don't have certainty if the returned result is valid.

## Where is your or other website hosted?
To this question, you can have a few different answers. Hosting is mostly a collection of a variety of different services. It is possible to have all your hosting services "made" in a single company. But it's not uncommon to see a having website and each of its hosting services provided through several hosting companies. As an example, services can vary to these:

- Domain Registration
- Hosted DNS
- Web hosting
- CDN
- Email Hosting

In this short article, we are going to focus on the website's `web hosting detection` via terminal command prompt.

## Website hosting checker background
This quick guide will provide you with instructions on how you can run a web hosting check with a simple command. Before a needs to be done brief installation procedure and then you can jump on research to find out who is hosting the website you would like to know about.You have to do these:

- Install Nmap the Network Mapper - Free Security Scanner
- Enter specific command into Terminal

This quick tut will focus on the installation process for OSX systems.

## How to install Nmap the Network Mapper
Nmap binaries for Apple macOS (x86-64) are available in [this Mac OS X Binaries section](https://nmap.org/download.html#macosx). You can find out the latest stable release installer is `nmap-7.93.dmg`. Download it and open the `dmg` file to start the installation.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/dbz2xjjke079wyq49nyy.png)

You'll be blocked by default in your system. So you have to head to `System Settings > Privacy & Security` and scroll down to the `Security` section where you can notice this message to approve with the `Open Anyway` button.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/k1239qk6jrc5otla3xqa.png)

## Let's start with hosting checker in your Terminal
Now just head to `Applications > Utilities` and look for [Terminal.app](https://support.apple.com/guide/terminal/welcome/mac). Open the `Terminal` and add this simple command that starts with `nmap` then you enter the domain name without `HTTP/S` and `WWW` prefixes and at the end you run nmap script `--script whois-ip`. The whole command looks like hereunder.

```
nmap yourwebsite.com --script whois-ip
```
You will get a long list of open ports where at the end will pops-up these Host script results like in this example.

```
Host script results:
| whois-ip: Record found at whois.arin.net
| netrange: 75.1.0.0 - 75.1.134.255
| netname: AMAZO-2
| orgname: Amazon.com, Inc.
| orgid: AMAZO-2
| country: US stateprov: WA
| orgtechname: Amazon EC2 Network Operations
|_orgtechemail: amzn-noc-contact@amazon.com
```
Based on the `netname` or `orgname` you can easily identify what hosting is your desired website on. To be more specific in a technocratic way `netrange` will provide a range of IPs.

And that's all. The whole magic. How to check website hosting via the terminal anytime you need. No need to rely on random online tools with uncertain results.


Thanks to [Taylor Vick](https://unsplash.com/@tvick?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=CreditCopyTextGratitude) for the cover image from Unsplash.