IP Address – What is an IP Address?

An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a numerical designation assigned to any device participating in a computer network which uses the Internet Protocol for communication between its nodes.

• In simple terms, the address of each server, computer, printer, web cam etc. connected to the Internet and using the Internet Protocol for passing data.

The designers of TCP/IP defined an IP address as a 32-bit number, known as IPv4. This provides the potential for a maximum of 2^32 (4,294,967,296) unique addresses. These addresses are usually displayed in the dotted-decimal notation form, i.e. 205.74.143.122.

However, due to the enormous growth of the Internet and the resulting depletion of available addresses, a new addressing system IPv6 using 128 bits for the address, was developed and standardized by RFC 2460 in 1998. This provides the potential for a maximum of 2^128 (3.403 × 10^38 approx) unique addresses.

Related Articles

• How to Remove HTML Tags from WordPress 3.x Comment Box
  How to Remove HTML Tags from WordPress 3.x Comment Box How to remove: "You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" ti...
• DNS Servers – What Are DNS Servers
  DNS Servers - What Are DNS Servers The Domain Name System (DNS) is the technology used for managing the names of Internet domains (web sites) using...
• IP Address – How to Find an IP Address for Any Url
  IP Address - How to Find an IP Address for Any Url If you want to find the IP address for a URL then all you need to do is ping the URL. To accompl...
• Sub-Domains – What are Sub-Domains?
  Sub-Domains - What are Sub-Domains? A sub-domain or child domain is the secondary domain created on top of a parent domain name. For example: ...
• Add on Domains – What Are Add on Domains?
  Add on Domains - What Are Add on Domains? Add on domain is a term used to describe the option to host additional domain names on a shared hosting a...