How IP Addresses Relate To Domain Names

Posted on August 16th, 2008 by admin in Domain News, Domaining 101 | No Comments »

Time for another educational article. If you hate learning and hate school then go away – I have no time for time wasters .

The web has been around for a while now and while we know that it helps humans interact on a global scale, implicitly, the web is all about computers. If you are not a techie, you might not be aware of the strong link between domain names and IP addresses, but while human readable names or domain names – like DNXpert.com – are great for us humans they don’t do much for computers. Computers use IP addresses to refer to each other.

An IP address (IP stands for Internet Protocol) is a 32-bit number represented in the form of four “octets” separated by decimal points. For example, the current DNXpert.com IP address is 76.79.77.29. Every website is accessible by it’s IP address, since IP addresses are what is used behind the scenes on the web. Try it, access DNXpert.com by it’s IP address http://76.79.77.29.

Servers or large scale computers that serve webpages have static IP addresses which don’t change very often. Personal computers usually have dynamic IP addresses that change every time you restart your DSL modem. Regardless of whether a computer uses a static or dynamic IP address, it’s still an IP address which is used to identify that computer on the web. If you want to check your own PCs IP address you can run IPConfig.exe in command prompt ( if you use Windows ), the command hostname if you use Linux, or use an online IP checking service.

So, if it’s all about IP addresses on the web, how exactly do we get to websites when we type a domain name into a browser?

Every time you type a domain name into a browser’s URL, the browser uses the Web’s domain name servers (DNS) to translate a human-readable domain name into a computer-readable IP address. During a day of browsing you are accessing DNS hundreds of times resolving your favourite domain names into their respective IP addresses.