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What's My IP Address Page

Your IP address as of Jan 28, 2012 12:19:55 AM

Welcome, your IP Address is: 38.107.179.217

What is your IP address and why would I want to know it?

Your IP address is your computer's location or address on the world Wide Web network or internet. The internet is nothing more the a bunch on computers networked together. Similar to the your home network, only bigger, much bigger. You can think of the internet as a big city, there are many, building, highways, roads, walkways and people traveling to and from different locations.

The buildings could represent all the web servers on the internet. A web server's goal is to send the code that creates a web site to your computer. Each building or web server will have a specific things available for you. For example if you where looking for your bank, the bank building would have an address such as 5341 Main St and the bank would have a common name such as 1st National Bank. But the building will also have something that very few people know about or really care about and this is the lot and block survey system. The banks lot and block address may look like this Lot 12 of Block62 of the North Subdivision plat as recorded in Map Book 16, Page 32 at the Recorder of Deeds for the Big City.. Now if you where lost and asked for directions in this form you would probably stay lost. Instead you ask directions to the 1st National Bank on Main St. which the reply is "Go south on Park Way for 6 blocks, take 9th Ave east for 9 blocks turn right on Main st and it's 5 blocks on your right".

The internet works very much the same way. When you want to visit your banks web site, you type in the name you know www.firstnationalbank.com. This is where the fun begins, your web browsers sends the request to the near by information center. Also known as the DNS or Domain Name System. Through out the world that are millions of computers that provide domain name services and in-order for you to visit the requested web site, the DNS must give you the block and lot number or IP address. For example if you type in google.com the DNS computers will first tell your computer that the location of the requested page is located at 74.125.47.103. Your browser then sends the request to that IP address and the Google web server sends the code that your web browsers needs to display the web page. To test this theroy out type this in your browser http://74.125.47.103/ and wala Google comes up.

Now this is where it's gets tricky. Since it is not possible for you to have a direct connection to your banks web site, your request will hop from one computer to the another to another until the request finally ends up at the correct IP addres. With each hop the requested information is passed along to the next computer. This information must contain two very important pieces of information. The first is the location or IP address of the web server, the second is your IP address. Yes, this is your exact location on the internet. And why does the bank need to know your exact location? Because they will need to send the code back to display their web site and they need to know where to send it. And that code will have to hop from computer to computer until is ends up on at your IP address. Once your computer receives the code from the banks web server, your web browser knows that it has requested this code and then renders the web page.