How do I find who's hosting DNS record?

[jfrizelle]

Hi,

A sister company of ours wants to move their website and dns hosting from whoever they're currently hosting with, and they have asked me to find out who hosts their DNS records at the moment.

Apart from querying their invoices to see who has billed them for it, is there some way to do a lookup to find who's hosting the DNS records?

Thanks,
J.

[DaveSawers]

The name of the registrar should be on the whois record. Look it up at: easyWhois: Lookup Domain Whois Records and Research DNS Information for example.

Also on the whois record will be the DNS information which should contain both IP addresses and possibly also the name of the company that looks after the DNS.

[deepsand]

Maintenance of DNS records & Hosting are 2 entirely different things.

Generally, it is the Domain's Registrar who maintains the DNS records, but such need not be so.

A WHOIS search will identify both the current Registrar for and the IP Address assigned to the Domain Name. An ARIN search, or a counterpart for areas other than North America, will reveal the party to whom the relevant block of IP Addresses is assigned to. This latter party may or may not be the Host for said Domain Name's site.

See American Registry for Internet Numbers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for info. re. ARIN & other Regional Internet Registries.

A site that I find particularly useful for researching IP/DNS matters is Whats my Ip Address, DNS Lookup Tool, Reverse DNS Look up Tools - HostName IPaddress mapping .

If you have difficulty with this, give us the Domain Name in question, and we will research it.

[Peter]

Try
Whois lookup and Domain name search

[jfrizelle]

Hi guys,

Many thanks for the replies.

One of the domain names in question is Ashbourne - Irish Cream Liqueur, and from looking at Easy Whois it seems that the registrar for the DNS record is Network Solutions - but it also mentions Eircom, a hosting company here in Ireland. I contacted Eircom, and they verified that they host the DNS record... so now I'm a bit confused! Do Eircom host the record or do Network Solutions? Or are Eircom a sort of 'middle-man' - we deal with them and they deal with Network Solutions on our behalf? Or can we deal directly with Network Solutions?

I know I can go through Eircom to get the job done, but I'm just curious now that I've started looking at it...

Rgds,
J.

[deepsand]

DNS records are not hosted; they are simply maintained by a "responsible party."

In the case of ashbourneirishcream.com , its IP Address is 94.125.221.66 .

A Reverse DNS search on that IP Address reveals the hostserver, i.e. the specific host device, to be "pc221-66.indigo.ie".

indigo.ie belongs to Eircom.

Therefore, the ashbourneirishcream.com site is hosted by Eircom , and it is they who are responsible for maintaining, or having someone maintain, the Authoritative DNS records for this Domain Name.

The Registrar's responsibility is to maintain those records which relate to the ownership of the Domain Name (DN), regardless of whether or not that DN has a site, or who hosts such site.

[jfrizelle]

Aha - gotcha! Thanks a lot for all that - I'd seen indigo.ie somewhere along the way, but didn't know what the significance of it was.

J.

[deepsand]

My pleasure.