How To Find Out Where You Bought Your Domain Name From If You’ve Forgotten

I own a stack of domain names. I’m a domain name addict.

The problem? (asides from the cost of renewals)…

Sometimes I forget where I bought them…

And it’s possible that you might have done the same – so how you can find out where you bought your domain name if you’ve forgotten?

Thankfully it’s pretty easy & in today’s blog post I’m going to explain exactly how you can do it.

A couple of clicks & you’ll have control over your domain name once again. Just remember to write down the name of the registrar where you bought it this time around though. ?

How To Find Out Where You Bought Your Domain Name From

The first method is the simplest.

Check your emails.

When you register your domain name the domain registrar will usually send an email to your inbox with the details of the purchase & if you run a search for your domain in your email client, you might just find it.

Lost the email? No problem – we have a fallback.

The fallback is to use something called a WHOIS search. The WHOIS search will pull up all of the details of your domain name, including where it was registered – and thankfully the search is free to do.

There are various WHOIS tools that you can use, but one of my favourites is this one provided by DomainTools.

So open that site in a new window, then firstly enter your domain as shown below:

Hit search, then the next page will bring up all of the details of your domain.

It’ll look something like this:

You can ignore most of the data though as the only bit you need to be interested in is the “Registrar” section.

Going off the above example we can see that the domain registrar is 123-Reg Limited as shown below:

Hopefully, the name in that section will make it obvious as to who the registrar is. For example, it might be Godaddy, or NameCheap, etc.

Some registrars though trade under different names from their company names.

It’s no big deal though, it just means an extra step.

Simply copy the name listed in the registrar section, head to Google & run a search for it.

Once again going off the above example a quick Google search reveals that the domain has been registered with 123-reg, and it kindly provides us with a link to their website:

Of course, for that particular example, we didn’t need to actually run the search as the registrar was pretty obvious – but I just wanted to include the screenshot in case you do indeed have to go through the extra step.

Either way though, hopefully, my quick little guide here has helped you to figure out who you purchased your domain from.

If you run into any problems though then don’t hesitate to leave a comment below. I’ll respond back to you as soon as I can. ?