Cloudflare is a web performance and website security company that provides services like CDN (Content Delivery Network), WAF (Web Application Firewall), DNS management, and security from attacks like DDoS.
More than 5,000,000 websites use Cloudflare to improve their loading speed, reduce the load on origin servers and prevent various online attacks.
Since Cloudflare is a reverse proxy service, it acts as an intermediary between website visitors and the host server. This makes it very hard for anyone to find the IP address of a website that uses Cloudflare.
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However, if you are interested in finding out these details of a website, then we have a few easy methods for you. So, let’s see how we can trace the IP address of a website and find out its actual hosting provider.
Method 1: Tracing past records of a website
The first method includes tracing the past DNS records of a website. Old DNS records can easily tell the services used by a website’s owners in the past.
Any website that uses Cloudflare nameservers must have used the basic nameservers provided by their domain registrar or hosting provider. These nameservers can easily expose the original IP address of a website’s hosting provider.
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You can use a service like SecurityTrails to look for past DNS records. Here’s how to use SecurityTrails to find the real IP address of websites powered by Cloudflare.
1. Go to the SecurityTrails website and enter the domain name you want to find the details about. Then hit Enter.
If that website uses Cloudflare services, you will see something like this:
2. Go to the Historical Data page. Login/ Signup when prompted.
3. It will show you all the past DNS records of a domain name. Here you will easily be able to find out the past IP addresses and hosting providers of a website before they shifted to Cloudflare.
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Method 2: Identifying technologies used by a website
If the first method didn’t work, then you can try using a service like Censys. It will help you discover all the network technologies that a host uses.
You can just key in the domain name, and it will tell you about all the services a website is currently using.
Here’s how you can use Censys to identify a website’s host:
Go to Censys search and simply enter the domain name you want to find the details about.
You will instantly be able to see the true host along with the real IP address of the website.
So, that’s how you can find out the IP address of a website that uses Cloudflare services.
These methods will work on most websites. However, if the website owners had set up a firewall on the origin servers, it would be impossible to find their real IP address.
Anyway, that is all from us. Let us know if you are aware of any other methods to find the true host or IP address of a website. In case you have any questions, then let us know in the comments below.
