How to detect the "owner" of a website?

Question

after some web research I hereby ask for some disambiguation of webhosting terms:

With a whois (as a command in a terminal or a web interface) one can detect the registrar of a specific domain. This registrar is a company (e.g. InterNIC, OpenNIC...) which sold or rented the domain to a natural person.

Can this person also be detected via a certain command or only by requesing the registrar for this information?

If there's something mixed up, please bear with me :-)

PS: My question relates to this one but as I assume the real owner does not necessarily have to be the company who sold the domain. Am I right?

Regards and thanks in advance

Answer 1

Using whois on domain name, you can person or company who has registered the domain. the output depends on who bought the domain - it could be a reseller and if it is, you will not get an info you want. http://whois.domaintools.com/stackowerflow.com

Using whois on IP address, you can detect hosting company:

ping stackowerflow.com # gives you 74.125.43.121

http://whois.domaintools.com/74.125.43.121

If you have a legal reason, why you need to contact website owner, the hosting company will pass his contact information to you. If you don't then just go to a website and look for a "contacts" page :)

Answer 2

There is some terminology that might be useful here:

• Registry - The company/organisations who has the agreement from ICANN to operate the TLD (Top Level Domain, the .com, .org, .net, .coop). These organisations are only allowed to sell these domain names to Registrars (Wholesale)
• Registrars - These are the companies that you, as a Registrant, go to to register domain names with. These registrars will often be able to sell you additional services like DNS, Email and Web hosting.
• Registrants - These are the end users (you and me) who want a domain name.

There are some registries that allow you to hide your (the registrant) details. An example of this is Nominet (who operate the ccTLD .uk). There are also some registrars that offer a proxy service which you can hide your true ID behind.

Your are correct in believing the the company who sold the domain (the registrar) is not person/company who registered the domain (the registrant). To make matters harder there is no standard format for the WHOIS output, which can been fetched from the registries WHOIS Server (TCP port 43). There is discussions at ICANN to push for a new standard IRIS that will standardise the result in an XML format, but this is a very long way off.

If you want to, like in the other question that you referenced, have to in some way identify if your visitor is the valid registrant of a domain name then the easiest way would be to allow the user to select one of the special RFC stated (sorry I can not remember which one it is) email addresses, that should be set up by the registrant, eg. postmaster@, hostmaster@, root@, admin@, and then send a unique code to that email address that the user can enter back via the website. This is one of the methods used by the SSL companies to verify the requester of a SSL certificate is authorised to use it.

Hope that this helps.

Jonathan

Answer 3

using whois :

Domain nameserver information for enom domains: http://blog.phpcode.co.in/php/domain-nameserver-information-enom-domains/

Domain nameserver information for UK domains: http://blog.phpcode.co.in/php/domain-nameserver-information-for-uk-domains/