Welcome! Your IP Address is something you hardly think about, isn’t it? But it is something that matters the most and without an IP Address you cannot step into the internet world. Anyways you don’t necessarily need to know what an IP Address is or what is your IP Address to access the internet (that’s all taken care of); but for all those enthusiasts this article will surely improve your understanding of the IP Address and the internet itself.

IP Address: The Definition

The basic thing about internet is that it is a network of computers. This network is very large and complex and involves every internet connected computer within it. That’s alright, but all this means there is a certain need to uniquely identify every computer and router, to send information to the exact destination. This unique number assigned is the IP Address (short for Internet Protocol Address). It can be compared to addressing a letter and obviously no two houses have the same address.

The internet, just like many other networks use the TCP/IP protocol standard to connect to various computers; where in which the IP Address helps pinpoint each computer uniquely. Since that you are interested to learn what IP Address means; you might also consider finding your IP Address.

IP Address: It’s Purpose and Functioning

So when you type onlinecmag.com, the Domain Name Server will convert this domain name (onlinecmag.com) into an IP Address. Actually this action is provoked by the TCP/IP protocol on your request. And this process is termed as ‘Domain Name Lookup’. The main reason behind this is, though we humans identify websites based on their domain names, computer do it using IP Addresses.

Let’s now concentrate on what’s in an IP Address that computers can understand. First of all any typical IP Address consists of 4 parts each having a value from 0 to 255; which means 00000000 to 11111111 in the binary number system (and everyone knows computers love 1s and 0s). So, 195.66.32.16 can be considered as example for an IP Address, though it appears as 11000011.01000010.00100000.00010000 to your computer. Whatever the IP Address is, the point is that it is assigned to your computer by a router.

Conclusion:

The IP Addresses are again classified based on several factors and all of them will be dealt with in the coming articles. And also note that the 32-bit IP Address (i.e. x.x.x.x called the dotted decimal format, which means 8 bits in each part totally amounting to 32) is the IPv4 (IP version 4) and because of the increase in internet users; now the IP address are of the IPv6 version which is a 128 bit IP Address.