How to Find Any Website’s Physical Location (and What It Actually Means)

What does it really mean to find a website’s physical location? Contrary to what one might think, a website’s real location is not the same as the company operating it. It actually points to the hosting server, and that can be in a totally different area than the company’s head office.

But what does knowing this do? Actually, there are plenty of things that can be inferred from this. Understanding how this works helps you evaluate website trustworthiness, troubleshoot performance issues, or simply satisfy curiosity about a domain’s digital footprint.

Let’s understand this in more detail and learn how you can find any website’s physical location.

What “Physical Location” Means in the Online World

A website doesn’t live in one fixed place. Instead, it’s stored on servers. Servers are just huge computers housed in data centers that could be anywhere in the world. When you look for the location of a website, what you uncover often points to:

• The hosting provider’s infrastructure
• A nearby content delivery network (CDN) node
• A cloud platform’s regional data center

And all of these places can be in entirely different locations from the company’s headquarters or operational base.

What You Can Infer From the Location of a Website

A website’s physical location can tell you a few things. For example, you can understand why it is loading slowly if it is situated on a different continent.

Websites also have to follow rules and regulations. For example, websites operating in the EU have to follow the GDPR. Typically, such regulations apply depending on the area where the website is hosted. So, you can use the location to find out whether the website is abiding by them or not.

However, you cannot determine the following from a website’s location

• Where the website owner personally lives
• Operational headquarters of the business
• Sensitive or private information about individuals

So, you are limited in what you can find out.

How To Find the Physical Location of a Website

There are several methods you can use to determine a website’s location. We have listed 2 of them below.

Method 1: Identify Via The Website’s IP Location

All websites have an IP address. It is a requirement if they want people to visit them. However, IP addresses have some location data associated with them. The IANA provides IP ranges to different countries and organizations and keeps a public record of who can use which address range.

So, what you do is use a tool to check the IP address of the website, then use an IP location checker to find its location. Here’s how you can do that.

• Open a browser and search for a DNS Record Lookup tool.
• You will find some free tools in the search. Pick any and navigate to A/AAAA records. 
• Enter the website’s name and hit enter
• You will receive the website’s IP address. 
• Then open a new tab
• Search for an IP location tool. 
• Pick any from the top 10 results.
• In the tool interface, paste the website’s IP address and press “Confirm.”

You will be shown the approximate location of the server hosting the website. IP location is typically accurate to the city level, so you will know the country, state/province, and the city of the hosting server.

Method 2: Check WHOIS and Hosting Metadata

A second method of finding the location of a website is to do an IP WHOIS lookup. Basically, an IP WHOIS lookup will tell you who the owner of an IP address is. Sometimes, this information also contains the address of the owner, which is usually an organization and is the same as where it keeps the hosting server. 

To do a WHOIS lookup, you will need to do the following:

• Open a browser
• Search for IP WHOIS Lookup tool
• Select one from the Search results.
• Enter the IP address of the website
• Hit “Confirm”

And you will be given a ton of data related to the address, such as the domain registrar, name server, and, of course, the hosting region.

Consider the Impact of CDNs and Proxies

There is a caveat to the aforementioned methods, though. You see many hosting providers use CDNs and proxies for load balancing and better delivery of data to edge computers.

In these cases, when you do an IP lookup to find the IP address, you will be given the address of the CDN instead. So, the subsequent IP WHOIS and IP Location methods will also just show you the location of the CDN instead of the origin server. The CDN location is usually very different from the origin server. It is often in a different country because it was made to cater to that specific region.

You might be able to see that it was a CDN from the info in the WHOIS lookup results, but you won’t be able to find out the IP address of the origin server. This is where finding a website’s physical location can fail.

Conclusion

So, there you have it: how to find the physical location of a website, its implications, and how you can do it yourself. In conclusion, there is not much benefit to doing this except for understanding routing issues, trustworthiness, and whether the site is breaking any regulations. But it is a thing you can do if you want.