How to find where your domain is registered

Step-by-step guide to finding out which registrar holds your domain name, even if you didn't set it up yourself.

Not sure which company holds your domain name? This is more common than you'd think — especially if someone else registered it for you, or if your business has changed hands. Here's how to find out quickly.

Quick summary

You can look up any domain's registrar for free with ICANN Lookup. Type in your domain name and it tells you which registrar holds it, when it expires and which nameservers it uses. What it usually won't tell you is who the registrant is — those details are normally hidden. To see those, log in to the registrar.

What you're looking for

When you look up your domain, you want to find:

Registrar — the company you pay to hold the domain (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Squarespace, and so on)
Expiry date — when the domain needs to be renewed
Nameservers — which DNS provider controls the domain's DNS records
Registrant contact — the name and email on the registration, if it's published at all (see below)

Method 1: ICANN Lookup (recommended)

ICANN runs a free lookup tool that reports the publicly available registration data for a domain.

Two things have changed here, and a lot of older advice hasn't caught up:

WHOIS has been retired for generic extensions. ICANN's announcement is blunt about it: "As of 28 January 2025, the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) will be the definitive source for delivering generic top-level domain name (gTLD) registration information in place of sunsetted WHOIS services." ICANN Lookup is the RDAP-based tool it points people to. Country-code extensions such as .co.uk are run by their own national registries, which set their own rules and may have their own lookup.
Most contact details are no longer published. Registrars and registries must always publish the domain, the registrar, the creation and expiry dates, the domain status and the nameservers. Registrant name, street, phone and email get redacted wherever privacy law requires it, which in practice is most of the time — the field comes back marked "REDACTED" rather than missing.

Go to the lookup tool. Open your browser and visit ICANN Lookup.

Type your domain name. Enter just the domain, like yourbusiness.com — no www, no https://.

Click Search. The results will appear within a few seconds.

Find the registrar. Look for a line that says "Registrar:" — that's the company that holds your domain.

Note the expiry date. Look for "Registry Expiry Date:" so you know when renewal is due.

Expect the contact details to be hidden

Two separate things hide registrant details, and either is normal. ICANN's Registration Data Policy requires the registrar to redact personal data wherever privacy law demands it, so you'll often see "REDACTED" whether or not you bought anything. On top of that, a privacy or proxy service replaces your details with the service's own. In both cases the registrar and the nameservers are still visible, which is what you came for. See Domain privacy protection explained.

Method 2: Check your email inbox

If someone registered the domain on your behalf, search your email for:

The registrar name (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Squarespace, and so on — if it was Google Domains, the registration moved to Squarespace in September 2023)
Subject lines like "domain registration," "domain renewal," or "welcome to [registrar]"
Payment receipts from a domain company

Method 3: Ask the person who set it up

If a previous developer, employee, or agency registered your domain, they should be able to tell you who the registrar is and hand over access. It's important that the account is in your name.

Make sure you have access to your own domain

If the domain is registered under someone else's name or email, ask them to transfer ownership to you. This is important — if you part ways, you need to be able to access and manage your domain independently. See Who owns your domain (and why it matters).

What to do once you know the registrar

Your email address is listed as the registrant contact.
Auto-renew is turned on. See Turning on auto-renew.
The account uses a current payment method.
Two-factor authentication is enabled on the account.

Common questions

The lookup shows "REDACTED" or a privacy service, not a real name. Is that a problem?

No, and it's what you should expect. Registrars redact personal contact data where privacy law requires it, and many also apply a privacy service on top — GoDaddy substitutes details from its partner Domains By Proxy, and Namecheap adds a free Domain Privacy subscription to every eligible registration by default. Log in to the registrar account to see and update your actual contact details.

The registrar is different from my web host — is that normal?

Yes, very common. Your domain can be registered at one company (like Namecheap) while your website is hosted at another (like Kinsta or WP Engine). They work together through DNS. See Domain vs hosting vs email.

Use the registrar's "forgot password" option with the email on file. If you don't have access to that email, contact the registrar's support team — they have identity verification processes to recover accounts.

I found two different nameservers to what I expected — is something wrong?

Not necessarily. Many sites point their domain's nameservers to Cloudflare for performance and security, while the domain itself stays registered at a different company. See Nameservers vs DNS records.

Need a hand?

If you're stuck, email support@chykalophia.com and we'll help. Include your website address and a screenshot if you can.