Website hosting history

Networks and hosting platforms

Each address on a result page shows the network (ASN) announcing it when the data was retrieved and the address block (CIDR) it belongs to. The ASN identifies the operator routing the address. It is often the hosting provider, but many platforms serve their customers' sites from addresses announced by a cloud provider or a CDN.

Addresses are those documented by each platform; networks are as announced on 24 September 2026, according to RIPEstat.

Netlify's 2025 address replacement

On 21 July 2025, Netlify announced a load balancer update for older sites. It asked affected customers to update their DNS by 31 August 2025, using these replacements:

A site following those instructions could have both addresses in its history while remaining on Netlify. The platform's announcement helps explain the address change; the site owner's records establish whether and when that site applied it.

Vercel and cloud instance addresses

A platform can change the addresses it gives its customers. Vercel describes 76.76.21.21 as a general-purpose anycast address and gives newer projects an address from a pool, such as 216.198.79.1. A domain that moves from one to the other is still on Vercel.

On cloud servers, the address can change with the server. On AWS, the standard public IPv4 address of an instance is released when the instance is stopped, and a new one is assigned when it starts again (AWS documentation).

Several addresses at once

GitHub Pages recommends four A records for an apex domain: 185.199.108.153, 185.199.109.153, 185.199.110.153 and 185.199.111.153.

Those addresses can be published together. If they appear with close recorded dates, they can describe one platform serving the site from several addresses. Reading each row as a successive host would turn that setup into four supposed hosting changes.

The list of networks on a result page is ordered by the earliest date of their addresses. Two networks in that list may have been used at the same time, for example with two CDNs.

Dating a hosting change

The recorded dates cannot confirm a migration date. On a CDN or a platform that rotates addresses, older addresses can fall outside the 300 records a page shows at most.

Network names on older addresses

Profundis looks up the network name and ASN when it returns the records, so for an address used years ago they describe the network announcing it on the retrieval date shown on the page, not the one that announced it then. IPv4 blocks change hands: an IPv4.Center analysis published by CircleID counts 596 transactions covering about 5 million IPv4 addresses in the first half of 2026 (CircleID, July 2026).

The location also comes from today's GeoLite2 data and can differ from where the address was when the domain used it.

IPv6 addresses (AAAA)

AAAA records hold a domain's IPv6 addresses. On 28 March 2026, Google measured 50.10% of its users reaching it over IPv6, the first time above half (Internet Society Pulse).

A platform can add IPv6 without any change by the site owner. Cloudflare creates AAAA records for proxied names by default (Cloudflare documentation), and the first IPv6 address in a history can come from that setting. Platforms often give several IPv6 addresses from one prefix, like the four GitHub Pages addresses 2606:50c0:8000::153 to 2606:50c0:8003::153.

A domain without AAAA rows in the results may still publish IPv6 addresses that were not returned or not collected.