Locating a Website's Server from Canada
When you run an IP lookup on a domain through this tool, we resolve the hostname via DNS, then pass the resulting IP through three independent geolocation lookups: the country database, the city-level database, and the registry's own published allocation data. The result is an approximate physical location for the server, typically accurate to the data centre or ISP point of presence, not the building down the street.
What you can typically determine
- Country: accurate well over 99% of the time
- Region or province: typically accurate around 95%
- City: approximate, especially for ISP customer IPs
- Timezone: derived from the city or region pairing
- Approximate coordinates: usually the ISP's regional hub, not a precise address
Canadian context: Some Canadian businesses host on US clouds (AWS us-east-1, Google us-central1). Geolocation will correctly show the US, even though the operator is in Toronto or Montreal.
For a quick yes-or-no answer to that exact question, try our Is It Hosted in Canada tool, which surfaces the same registry data with a clear verdict. Most Canadian-hosted sites sit in one of around a dozen major facilities, and you can browse the full list in our Canadian data centres directory.
Finding Out Who Owns an IP Address
Every public IP address on the internet is allocated to an organization by one of five Regional Internet Registries. For Canada, that's ARIN. Ownership data is published openly via the modern RDAP protocol and the older WHOIS protocol.
What ownership data includes
- Registrant organization: the entity that holds the IP block (e.g. Rogers, Bell, OVH Hosting)
- ASN (Autonomous System Number): the network operator that routes the IP on the internet
- CIDR block: the range of IP addresses owned together
- Abuse contact email: required for reporting spam, attacks, or policy violations
- Allocation history: when the block was assigned and last modified
Ownership lookups are the standard tool for tracing the company behind a server. They're used routinely for abuse reporting, network engineering, and cybersecurity investigations. For domain-level ownership data (registrar, expiry, contact info, rather than IP block ownership), our domain WHOIS lookup tool handles that side of the lookup.
Detecting VPNs, Proxies and Hosting IPs
VPN providers, proxy networks, Tor exit nodes, and commercial hosting providers all have IP ranges that can be identified with the right datasets. A general-purpose IP lookup will surface a few useful clues:
- ASN belongs to a hosting company (DigitalOcean, OVH, AWS): strong signal the IP isn't a residential connection
- Reverse DNS looks like data centre infrastructure (e.g.
server-01.dal.linode.com)
- Registry data lists the owner as a known VPN provider: common with NordVPN, Mullvad, ExpressVPN ranges
- Geolocation mismatch with browser timezone or language: a Canadian-language browser session coming from a Romanian IP suggests a VPN
Full proxy and VPN detection requires a paid privacy dataset (IPQualityScore, ipdata, MaxMind GeoIP2 Anonymous IP). This tool flags strong signals but isn't a complete VPN detector.
IPv6 Address Lookups
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long and written in eight groups of four hex characters, like 2606:4700:4700::1111. Every lookup our tool performs works identically for IPv4 and IPv6. Geolocation, RDAP, reverse DNS, and ASN data all return the same fields.
Key differences from IPv4
- 340 undecillion possible addresses, vs. 4.3 billion for IPv4. The pool is effectively unlimited.
- Reverse DNS uses
.ip6.arpa instead of .in-addr.arpa
- RDAP works identically: same protocol, same servers, just different address format
- Geolocation accuracy is generally lower: IPv6 allocations are younger and less geographically tagged
Canada has unusually high IPv6 adoption, at around 59% of Canadian networks. Google's IPv6 statistics and APNIC's per-country measurements both rank Canada in the top ten globally.
RDAP vs WHOIS: What's the Difference?
WHOIS is the original protocol for querying IP and domain ownership, dating to 1982. It returns plain text in inconsistent formats. Every registry's response looks different. RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) is the modern replacement: it returns structured JSON, runs over HTTPS, and follows a consistent schema across all five Regional Internet Registries.
Why this tool prefers RDAP
- Structured data: reliable parsing, no regex guesswork
- Standardized fields: same response shape from ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC, AFRINIC
- HTTPS by default: replaces unencrypted port-43 WHOIS
- Internationalization: proper UTF-8 support for non-Latin character sets
- Faster: JSON over HTTP/2 versus a TCP socket per query
WHOIS is still used as a fallback when RDAP isn't available for a particular registry or top-level domain. The IANA bootstrap registry publishes the mapping of which registry serves which IP range or TLD.
