Frequently asked questions

IP Cow (ipcow.com) has answered one question since 2005: what's my IP address? Two decades later, it's grown into a whole privacy-first toolkit—IP, DNS, email, and RDAP checks plus connection tests—with a new promise: no login, no ads, no tracking. And yes, there's a cow.

Nothing on IP Cow watches you. We run no identifying analytics, no advertising networks, no fingerprinting, and no third-party scripts, fonts, or trackers from Google, Microsoft, Apple, or any other Big Tech.

The tools—including the What's-My-IP widget—talk only to our own endpoints. We don't collect data from you, so we can't ever sell or share your data. If you create an account on IP Cow, all of your data is encrypted. We don't have the keys—your password is the key. Requests may appear briefly in operational server logs used purely to keep the service running and secure. They're short-lived, never tied to your identity, and only stored in your encrypted store if you opt-in. See the privacy policy for the full picture.

Privacy is the default, not a setting. No accounts, no ad networks, no big-tech round-trips — just fast, honest tooling. There's nothing to opt out of, because there's nothing collecting you in the first place: no analytics that identify you, no fingerprinting, and the What's-My-IP widget talks only to our own endpoint.

Every IP Cow server runs on Hetzner infrastructure in Germany (Falkenstein). That's a deliberate choice, not an accident of convenience.

We host in Germany specifically for its privacy-protection laws. The EU GDPR and Germany's own Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) are among the strongest data-protection regimes in the world, and German jurisdiction keeps your traffic out of reach of laws like the US CLOUD Act. Combined with our no-tracking, no-third-party design, the legal floor matches the technical one — your lookups stay private by law as well as by architecture.

No—and that's deliberate. No big-tech dependency. DNS is resolved over Quad9, RDAP comes straight from the regional registries, and geolocation runs on self-hosted GeoLite2. Nothing is quietly routed through Google, Microsoft, or Apple, and there are no third-party scripts, fonts, or CDNs.

You enter a domain and pick a record type. Our server then performs the query over DNS-over-HTTPS (RFC 8484): it encodes the question into the binary DNS wireformat, sends it to a privacy-first resolver, and decodes the wireformat response itself — there is no third-party "lookup API" in the middle that could log your query.

The result you see (A, AAAA, MX, TXT, CAA and friends) is parsed from that raw answer and returned as clean JSON. The same core code runs the website and the API, so what you see in the browser is exactly what an automated call gets.

By default, Quad9 — a Swiss non-profit, privacy-first resolver that blocks known-malicious domains and does not log the data that would identify you. We talk to it over encrypted DoH, never plain UDP port 53.

If Quad9 is briefly unreachable, we fall back to Cloudflare DNS so your lookup still completes. Your queries are never routed through Google, Microsoft, or Apple, and never through an ad-tech company.

Yes — IP Cow is built to be automated. Every tool has a clean JSON endpoint and a copy-paste curl recipe, so the checks you run by hand drop straight into a script.

For your IP specifically, checkip.ipcow.com returns it as plain text — curl checkip.ipcow.com, with -4 or -6 to force a stack. Metered API access and monitoring subscriptions are on the way.