How to find who owns an IP address

You can find out which organisation owns an IP address (an ISP, a hosting company, a business) in seconds and for free. Paste it into the FernTool IP lookup to see the network owner, country and whether it belongs to a VPN, Tor or a data centre. What you can’t get from an IP alone is a private person’s name or home address.

Step 1: IP lookup (owner, country, VPN check)

Open the IP lookup and enter the address. You’ll see the ASN (the network’s ID number) and its owner, for example “AS37457 Telkom SA” or “AS16509 Amazon”, the approximate country, and flags for Tor exits and cloud servers. If the owner is a home ISP, the address belongs to one of its customers; if it’s a cloud or hosting company, it’s a server or a VPN.

Step 2: WHOIS / RDAP (the official registration)

Run the address through the WHOIS lookup. It asks the regional internet registry (AFRINIC for Africa, RIPE for Europe, ARIN for North America, APNIC, LACNIC) who the block is registered to. Look for the organisation name, the network range (for example 196.25.0.0/16) and, most usefully, the abuse contact email.

Step 3: Reverse DNS (the server’s name)

The reverse DNS lookup turns the IP back into a hostname. Names often give the game away: crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com is Google’s crawler, ec2-…compute.amazonaws.com is an Amazon server, and many ISPs use names that include the town or line type. To confirm a hostname is genuine, look it up forwards with the DNS lookup and check it points back to the same IP.

What you can’t find out (and who can)

An ISP knows which customer used an address at a given time, but it will only share that with police or under a court order. In South Africa that goes through the police and the courts (for example under the Cybercrimes Act), not a request from the public. Location from an IP is also approximate: usually the right country, sometimes the right city, never a street. See public vs private IP for why addresses like 192.168.x.x can’t be traced at all.

How to report abuse from an IP

Note the exact IP, date, time and time zone, and keep the evidence (email headers, server logs).
Find the abuse contact in the WHOIS result (often abuse@ the provider).
Email it a short, factual report. Hosting companies act on spam, phishing and attacks; for threats or fraud, report to the police too.

Is someone seeing your IP?

Every site you visit sees your public IP the same way. If you’d rather not show it, read how to hide your IP address.

Frequently asked questions

Can I find someone’s name from their IP address?

No. Public tools show the ISP or company that owns the address and a rough location. Only the ISP can link it to a customer, and it releases that only to police or under a court order.

How do I find out what company owns an IP?

Use an IP lookup to see the ASN owner, then a WHOIS (RDAP) lookup for the registered organisation and its abuse contact.

Is it legal to look up an IP address?

Yes. IP ownership records are public, and looking them up is normal practice for network admins and security teams.

Why does the IP show a different city?

IP location databases map address blocks to where the ISP registers or routes them, so results are often a nearby big city rather than your town.