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This article shows you how to find out who owns a website. If the domain’s owner signed up for private domain registration, the public can’t find out who they are. You could still be able to discover the owner by using the information on the domain’s website, in search engines, in the ARIN database, and on social media networks.
Some registrants want to keep their information private, in which case the WHOIS lookup service might not show their personal information. The Wayback Machine (archive.org) is another excellent tool that lets you look at older versions of websites and check if they used to have information on the site’s owner.
Ways to find out who owns a website
Check If The Domain Name Is Listed in the WhoIs Directory
Did you know that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) controls all domain name registrations? For every domain name, they need a registrant, an administrator, and a technical contact. This can be the same person or company. Each contact must give their name, mailing address, phone number, and email address. This information is kept in the WhoIs directory and can be seen by anybody.
Domain name owners can choose to keep their information secret, which can be a bad thing (or a good thing, depending on your point of view) or a good thing for Network Solutions customers that use Perfect Privacy. This kind of private registration service changes the contact information on the registration to be that of the registrar or the private registration service provider of the registrar.
When privacy is turned on, it’s good (or bad, depending on your point of view) that you may still utilize the information in WhoIs to contact the domain name owner. Depending on how they set up their email, the private registration email address should forward to the owner of the domain name.
You may also use WhoIs to figure out how probable it is that a domain name will become available. WhoIs shows the registrar with whom it’s registered, the date it was first registered, when it’s slated to expire, and what its status is. A domain with an inactive status or a newer one close to its expiration date has a good probability of becoming available. If you backorder the domain, you’ll get it when it becomes available, which might be a good investment.
Contact the Domain Registrar
After you’ve tried everything else, you can talk to the company that registered the domain name. WhoIs tells you where a domain name is registered, as we talked about in the last step. If privacy is turned on, you can use the information in the directory listing or go to the registrar’s website to find their contact details.
Even if privacy settings are turned on, you might not be able to acquire the information you seek, but registrars have to do certain things if a domain has been used for illegal things.
Visit the Website
If you want to know who owns a domain name, you should go to their domain as a first step. You will know right away if someone is using it to host a website or not, and the landing page may even have contact information or links to it.
You will often end yourself on a page with no information at all. You could move on to the next step right away, but you might want to check public archives like The Wayback Machine to determine if the domain has ever been used to host a website previously. Even though it’s unlikely, a fast search could turn up contact information or other clues.