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IP address, you’ve probably heard this term before but never totally understood what it meant. Well let’s go over it. Your IP address is pretty much what it sounds like, an address. Computers and websites all have their own unique IP address. It’s a set of numbers that your computer uses to access the internet and the internet then uses to verify that it’s your computer.
Confusing? OK let’s try this, if you write a letter, you put the person’s address on it, and you put your address on the envelope as well, this way the person knows who the letter is from, and the post office knows where to send the letter back to if the address you sent it to doesn’t exist. Well the internet works the same way.
There is a more complicated explanation for this but for now we will stick with the simple way of looking at it. Every computer has an IP address, it’s just like your home address. Each website has its own IP address that is registered to it. So when you type a website into your web browser, the internet translates the “www.something.com” into its IP address and takes you to the website. The internet performs a quick check on your IP address to make sure you’re still there and then shows you the page. Just like the post office checks to make sure your return and outgoing address are correct before it sends the letter.
As I said earlier there is a more complicated explanation but it’s kind of confusing and will only detract you from understanding this right now. And since the whole point of this site is to help understand the basics, we will stick with it :).
Now there are many ways to find your IP address, but I will only explain one of them for now. If enough people comment on how to find it other ways I’ll post about that, but for now we’ll use this method. Assuming you are using Microsoft Windows XP (your operating system), you want to click on the Start button, then click on Run. A box will pop up, type in “cmd” in the box (without the quotes) and hit OK. A small black window will appear with C:\Documents and Settings\(your user name). Type in “ipconfig” and hit the Enter key. Do you see the lines of text that appear? One of them will say IP Address, and guess what? Those numbers are your IP address. Pretty simple huh?
Well that’s all for now. Hopefully you all now have a basic understanding of what your IP address is and a way to find it. Please feel free to leave comments if this was helpful or questions about anything that seems confusing with this post.
