Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. I may receive compensation when you click on links to products in this post. For an explanation of my Advertising Policy, visit this page. Thanks for reading!
How to hide hosting information for a website.
The most common way to hide hosting information for a website would be to use a CDN like Cloudflare, although other CDNs will do the job as well. Cloudflare just seems to be the most popular CDN.
Also many that use Cloudflare have reported it works quite well in hiding your web hosting when someone is trying to find WhoIs hosting your website.
However, if someone is determined and has the knowledge and wherewithal to find you, eventually they will. There is always a way.
But using a CDN in most cases will hide your IP identity.
This is why a lot of piracy sites use CDNs to mask their real server IP addresses. Even doing multiple reverse proxies after their CDN can obfuscate that much more.
So basically, in a nutshell, there are two ways to hide your Web Hosting Provider:
- Using a CDN instead of your Hosting Provider’s DNS.
- Buy your Web Hosting from a White-label Hosting Provider.
Again, If someone wants to know where your website is hosted, they will still be able to get that information somehow, you can’t fully prevent them from scraping information about you.
But, if you take those two steps above, you should be able to stop normal people who don’t know how to use advanced tools or techniques to find you.
Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not help you to hide your IP address if someone uses a tool or SSH to track you and will eventually be able to find out your real IP address.
You can use a CDN to hide your host in the “Whois” records, but still, if anyone wants to find out who’s your host, they can do it by taking a peek at your Server’s IP address.
At the very least, you will need to enable the “Whois privacy protection”, if you’d like to hide the personal details of the website’s owner.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to hide the domain registrar’s name. We go into “Whois privacy protection” limitations more below.
When you enable the privacy protection, it will hide all your personal details, but not the Registrar’s email address, contact details etc.
The second best way, as mentioned above, is to use a reverse proxy, many CDNs provide these nowadays like Cloudflare.
A good CDN not only hides your IP address, but also does the caching of your website’s content over all of their servers.
So, whenever someone tries to reach your website, the CDN tries to fetch the cached data from their nearest server.
That also helps your server load balance. CDNs also help you optimize your website content and provide many security protections like DDoS and IP restrictions.
You can use a CDN to hide where your server is running too, then the domain is hosted on their servers and your main server is not used directly.
CDNs usually market themselves as a caching system, which they are, but they’re basically used by most as a way to hide where their data is being served from.
Why hide your web hosting information?
The main reason I guess most website owners would want to hide their web hosting information is because of frivolous DMCA takedown notices.
You see, just because your personal information is hidden when you get “Whois privacy protection” for your website, doesn’t mean your web hosting information is hidden. Because it’s not.
All someone needs to do in order to serve you with a DMCA takedown notice is to contact the name of your Web Hosting Provider, give them your website domain address and serve it to them.
Most Web Hosting Providers will then serve you the DMCA takedown notice and many will even take your entire website off the internet and serve you the DMCA takedown notice as well.
Your Web Hosting Provider will then expect you to rectify the situation. There are several ways to combat frivolous DMCA take down notices.
You could check out this post here, “What is DMCA ignored hosting? Here’s why you may need it.”.
Therefore, one of the easiest ways for bad actors to serve a frivolous DMCA takedown notice is simply to go find out who the Web Hosting Provider is for a website, then send the DMCA take down notice to them.
Is it possible to anonymously host a website?
Yes, it is possible to anonymously host a website. Check out this blog post where we go through just how to host a website anonymously, “How to host a website anonymously. Anonymous website hosting FAQs.”
Should I hide my WHOIS information?
Absolutely! In fact, there is no downside to hiding your WhoIs information.
Actually, most popular domain name registrars even include “WhoIs privacy protection” when you buy a domain name through them.
Many will even include free “WhoIs privacy protection renewals” every time you renew your domain name through them as well.
Should I hide personal info of my domain?
Nowadays, spam seems to be out of control. Back in the old days in the times of landlines and when we received most of our mail through our physical mailboxes, controlling spam and unwanted solicitations was easy.
If you got a spam phone call, you simply hung up.
If you got spam mail otherwise known as “junk mail”, you simply tossed it in the garbage. Then came email. Spammers found a new way to solicit us with their unwanted garbage.
But then soon after email boxes became equipped with filters and of course the old reliable delete button.
Nowadays there are “robocalls” which are almost impossible to stop. As far as unwanted solicitations website owners must combat, one of the first things you need to do is to protect your personal information as much as possible.
This can be done through “WhoIs privacy protection” as I’ve gone through above.
However, WhoIs privacy protection does have it’s limitations.
The limitations of “Whois privacy protection” services.
Although “WhoIs privacy protection” is great for hiding our personal information like our names, addresses, email addresses even our phone numbers, however, there is still plenty of information for spammers and other nefarious actors to get their hands on such as:
- Web Hosting Provider information.
- Your IP address.
- Your domain name registrar.
There are a few services online that will give you this information and more, simply based upon your Domain Name’s URL.
However, much of the other information that’s available on some of these services online are guesstimates at best.
Although just the top three pieces of information that someone can get about you that “Whois privacy protection” doesn’t hide is enough for them to still cause you a few headaches.
That is why you may want to take some extra steps to protect your website’s identity. For example, you might want to get Anonymous Hosting and Domain Name Registration.
At the very least, if any of these are a concern to you, then simply getting a CDN for your website, even without Anonymous Hosting can go a long way.
As I said at the beginning of this post, most go for Cloudflare. However, most CDNs will do this as well.
Besides, you also get the benefits of increased web page loading speeds.
In fact, most website owners get CDNs for just this purpose alone, without knowing all the other hidden benefits of using a CDN, including obfuscating the name of their Web Hosting Provider.
How to hide hosting information for a website, conclusions.
In summary, the best way to hide the hosting information for a website would be to get a CDN.
This is of course, in addition to getting “Whois privacy protection” from your Domain Name Registrar.
These should be looked at as a bare minimum for hiding, not only your personal information, but hosting information for your website as well from prying eyes.
However, if you truly want to go deeper into anonymity, you should probably get offshore web hosting and throw in a CDN on top of an offshore hosting plan for good measure.
