IP Address Numbering Overview

You may see the term IP Address mentioned a lot in relation to web site hosting and be wondering what it means and if it's important for you understand it, or even know anything about it at all!.

In general if you just own one web site it probably is not necessary to learn about this subject but if you are a serious affiliate or internet marketer you need to understand the basics, especially if you own several web sites, for reasons I'll explain later.

IP address is short for internet protocol address. The IP address is effectively the address of a computer that is connected to the internet. It is in many ways similar to your house street address, if you want mail delivered you need an address and you need to give that address out to people who might want to send you mail.

In the same way if you want people to find your web site they need to your web site address, other wise no traffic!

When the internet was invented it was never envisioned that there would be hundreds of millions of computers connected, so the address system is limited. The present system uses a 32-bit number that is divided into four octets (8-bit sections), each octet being in the range 0...255.

You could think of each octet as a byte on a modern computer. Each octet is separated by a decimal point and this type of format is commonly called 'dotted decimal notation' ( e.g. 201.103.61.121 ).

So the lowest number is 0.0.0.0 and the highest is 255.255.255.255

It is important to remember that dotted decimal notation described above only exists to aid human beings to understand IP Addresses, computers just use a long series of 1's and 0's.