I'm helping my uncle who has a website that he doesn't remember anything about, whatsoever. He has had it for years and he's very unstructured. I tried getting him to find a bill from the hosting-company, where he has his website - but he says he's paying to so many things that he doens't know what is, so that wasn't an option.
I tried running a whois on his domain, but it's pointing to a free online DNS-redelegation tool ( www.gratisDNS.dk - the nameservers are called ns1.gratisdns.dk, ns2.gratisdns.dk, ...). I know that many companies use this tool to redirect the traffic to their own hosting-solution (since gratisdns means 'free dns').
So the question is, if I can find the hosting company some other way, by having the domain name and the name-servers? I would assume that the answer is 'no' (just FYI).
The WHOIS protocol works for IP addresses, as well as domain names. If you find the IP address the site is hosted on and look it up, it should return information about the owner of the IP address and therefore who hosts the website.
For example, for stackoverflow.com:
$ ping stackoverflow.com
PING stackoverflow.com (104.16.33.249) 56(84) bytes of data.
...
$ whois 104.16.33.249
...
NetRange: 104.16.0.0 - 104.31.255.255
CIDR: 104.16.0.0/12
NetName: CLOUDFLARENET
NetHandle: NET-104-16-0-0-1
Parent: NET104 (NET-104-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Assignment
OriginAS: AS13335
Organization: CloudFlare, Inc. (CLOUD14)
RegDate: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2015-10-01
Comment: https://www.cloudflare.com
Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-104-16-0-0-1
...