Reverse IP Lookup: Find IP Locations & Hostnames

An IP address lookup allows you to find all of the publicly available information about an IP address including its geolocation, ISP, hostname, and more. This IP address can be your own, or it can be any IP address on the internet.

To use an IP lookup, you’ll need to know the IP address you want to learn about before using the tool. That’s why you may see tools like this referred to as ‘reverse’ IP lookups.

This is the big difference between this IP lookup tool and an IP checker tool, which only gives you information about your own IP address.

There are limits to the information it can give you, though. It’s all 100% legal and every bit of info you see is publicly available.

Our tool uses the MaxMind and BigDataCloud databases to retrieve all the information shown. Anyone can access it, our tool simply presents it neatly in one place.

The diagram below shows how the tool works:

Finding out who an IP address belongs to is simple. If you know the IP address you want to lookup (either your own or someone else’s) just enter it into the tool at the top of this page and click Get Details.

From this IP address, our tool will gather all the key information associated with it, including:

• PTR record
• Host name
• ISP
• ASN
• ASN organization
• Network
• Geolocation

Want to know what you can use this information for? We explain it all below.

Here’s what you can do with all the information our IP lookup tool reveals:

Find Out Where an IP Address Is Physically Located

It’s not 100% accurate, but you can use this IP lookup tool to check the physical location of an IP address.

Our tool can name the country, state/province, and city that an IP address originates from. The country is accurate 99% of the time, but it gets less accurate the more granular the data gets.

Check An Email Is Legitimate

A PTR, or ‘pointer’, record can be used to check that an email is really coming from the person or organization it claims to be coming from. Take the IP address of the email sender, put it into our tool, and make sure that the domain name listed in the PTR record is correct.

Resolve an IP Address to Hostname

IP addresses are not designed to be remembered by humans – that’s why we use DNS to pair them with more memorable names (the domain names you enter into your web browser search bar every day).

An IP lookup can tell you the hostname of the IP address in question, giving you a much clearer idea of what website or user the IP address belongs to.

Finding the ISP that Administers the IP Address

If you want to know who someone else’s ISP is, you can use an IP lookup to find out. If you’re looking for details about your own ISP, you can also use the IP lookup tool here or check your ISP with our dedicated tool.

If you’re the bill payer then it’s unlikely you’ll need this, but if you’re in a rental property, college dormitory, hotel, or hospital then this can often be the easiest and most practical way to find out the ISP behind the connection you’re using.

The ASN lets you do similar, only you can use it to gain even more information about the ISP. Every ISP has a unique ASN (autonomous system number), and with it you can find out where an ISP is based and see how many IP addresses it has been assigned.

Using the IP lookup tool is easy, but first you need to know the IP address you want to look up.

Finding Your Own IP Address

Finding out your own IP address is easy – here are four ways you can do it:

Use an Online IP Checker Tool

The simplest and quickest way to find out the IP address of the network you’re currently connected to is to use an online IP checker. It will tell you your IP address ( IPv4, IPv6, or both), along with other data like your geolocation and hostname. It takes seconds and requires no technical know-how.

Use Google

An equally easy method is to simply ask Google. Open up a new browser tab and search What is my IP address?. Google will show you the answer at the top of the results page.

This method, while very straightforward, doesn’t give you any more information about your IP address, though.

Use Windows Command Prompt

On your Windows PC or laptop, click on the Start menu and type in cmd. This will reveal an application called Command Prompt – click it to run it.

Now type in the following command exactly: nslookup myip.opendns.com resolver1.opendns.com and press Enter.

The final line of text revealed will be labeled Address – that’s your public IP address.

Use macOS Terminal

Press Cmd + Space bar to open up the search bar, then type in Terminal. Click on the result to run it.

Type in the following command exactly: curl ipecho.net/plain ; echo and press Enter. Terminal will now tell you your public IP address.

Finding Someone Else’s IP Address

Finding out someone else’s IP address is a little more complicated. Here are some methods you can try:

Pinging a Website

If you want to find out the IP address of a website you can try pinging it.

The process is the same on Windows Command Prompt and macOS Terminal. Open up whichever one applies to you, then type out ping host address – however make sure you replace host address with the URL of the website you want to see the IP address of. Then press Enter.

You’ll be shown the IP address of the website you pinged.

Checking an Email Header

Emails you’ve received can contain the sender’s IP address. However, this is not always the case, and it can even be spoofed or changed by the sender. You can still try this method out, though.

Find an email in your inbox from the person who’s IP address you want to find. Now you need to open what’s called the email header.

There are different ways of doing this depending on which mail client you use, but you need to use a desktop or laptop web browser for all of them.

• Gmail: Open an email, click the three dot menu in the top right-hand corner, then click Show original. Now click the blue button labeled Copy to clipboard. This will copy the whole email header for you.
• Outlook/Hotmail: Open an email, click the three dot menu in the top right-hand corner, then click View > View message source. Highlight and copy all of the text in the window that pops up.
• Yahoo! Mail: Open an email, then click More > View Raw Message. Copy all of the text in the window that pops up.

Once you have your message header copied, you need to use a message header analyzer to make sense of it. There are plenty – we use Microsoft’s own MHA tool.

Paste your header into the tool and wait for it to analyze it. Now search the page for a field named x-originating-ip. This is the IP address of the person who sent the email, before it reaches the email server’s forwarding service.

As we said, this IP can be spoofed. This method is not fool proof, and some message headers will not even have an originating IP address.

There are other ways to obtain IP addresses of people you interact with online, be it via gaming, web chat, or anything else, but they are morally ambiguous and, as privacy advocates, we cannot recommend them.

There are also several bits of information that simply cannot be used to find someone’s IP address. For example their phone number, name, address, or ISP are not individually enough to reveal a full IP address.

This tool isn’t just for looking up IP info – it also allows you to perform a reverse DNS lookup.

Ordinarily, you might use a tool to check your own DNS servers, or to find the IP address associated with a particular DNS record. This is known as a forward DNS lookup.

The tool on this page instead performs a DNS query to fetch a DNS address based on the IP address you enter. It then shows this information under the PTR record field.

These PTR records are commonly used to prevent things like spam mail, referencing them to make sure that the message is coming from a legitimate DNS server.