What Is an IP Address?
Having a good mental picture about how the Web works is important, so we’ll walk through how browsers and websites work.
You can think of an IP address kind of like a street address for a computer. If you want to send a message to a computer, you need to know its address on the Internet.
There are two forms of IP addresses:
- IPv4, which is in a format like
127.0.0.1 - IPv6, which is in a format like
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
The IPv4 system only allowed for 4 billion addresses, and the Internet has grown larger than 4 billion devices. IPv6 was created to solve that problem.
There are so many IPv6 addresses available that it has been estimated every square millimeter of Earth’s surface could be given more than 665 quadrillion (665,570,793,348,866,944) IP addresses. We won’t run out for a while.
You might see IP addresses in either form. Later we’ll set up nameserver records for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
For your computer to visit a website on the Internet, your computer needs to find out the IP address of the website, which it does through the Domain Name System or DNS. That will be covered in the next section.
Takeaways
Things that you should know from this section:
- Every computer on the Internet, including Web servers and your own computer, has a public IP address.
- There are two forms of IP address: IPv4 (contains periods) and IPv6 (contains colons).