Monday 17 June 2013

What is IP Address

IP address is a fascinating product of modern computer technology designed to allow one computer or other digital device to communicate with another through Internet. IP addresses allow the location of literally billions of digital devices that are connected to the Internet to be pinpointed and differentiated from other devices which are accessible for that. In the same sense that someone needs your mailing address to send you a letter, a remote computer needs your IP address to communicate with your computer or PC.

Normally, IP stands for Internet Protocol, so an IP address is an Internet Protocol address. Internet Protocol is a set of rules that govern Internet activity and facilitate completion of a variety of actions on the World Wide Web. Therefore an Internet Protocol address is part of the systematically laid out interconnected grid that governs online communication by identifying both initiating devices and various Internet destinations, thereby making two-way communication possible.

IP address consists of four numbers, each of which contains one to three digits, with a single dot (.) separating each number or set of digits which are used. Each of the four numbers can range from 0 to 255. See the example of what an IP address might look like: 192.168.1.8. This innocuous-looking group of four numbers is the key that empowers you and me to send and retrieve data over our Internet connections (network), ensuring that our messages, as well as our requests for data and the data we've requested, will reach their correct Internet destinations and without this numeric protocol, sending and receiving data over the World Wide Web would be impossible to work out it.

IP addresses can be either static or dynamic. Static IP addresses never change and they serve as a permanent Internet address and provide a simple and reliable way for remote computers or PC to contact you.

Dynamic IP addresses are temporary and are assigned each time a computer or PC accesses the Internet easily. They are, in effect, borrowed from a pool of IP addresses that are shared among various computers and since a limited number of static IP addresses are available, many ISPs reserve a portion of their assigned addresses for sharing among their subscribers in this way.

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