Checking where your DNS is hosted


This article explains how to check where your Nameservers and A records are hosted. For an overview of DNS, view the following article.

Using online tools to check your DNS

There are many websites available for you to check your DNS. For example.

General DNS record lookups

DNS propagation tests

If you just updated your DNS, use the following tool to check what locations it has updated online.

  • – Used to check if your DNS records have propagated in different locations

Checking your site's DNS via SSH

The following lists several commands you can run to check your site's DNS values. To run these commands, you must use an SSH terminal. View the SSH overview article for details.

Checking Nameservers

This command checks where your site's Nameservers are currently hosted. The +short option simplifies the output so you only see the Nameservers without additional information.

[server]$ dig ns +short

Checking A records

This checks where the A records (IP addresses) of your site are hosted.

[server]$ dig +short
[server]$ dig +short

You can then run the host command to check where that IP is hosted from.

[server]$ host domain name pointer

The output of this is backwards. For example, all the way to the right shows that the IP is hosted at ''.

To the left is the server name at DreamHost. This shows it's hosted on the DreamHost server named 'tool'.

To the left of that is the specific apache instance the site is on called 'apache2-emu'.

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Article last updated PST.