I’m sure you have probably heard the term “IP Address,” but unless you are in IT or a computer science major, you probably don’t know much about it or how it works.

IP Address stands for Internet Protocol Address. It is a unique group of numbers that computers, tablets, and smartphones use to identify themselves and communicate with other devices on a network.

In layman’s terms, an IP address serves the same purpose for a computer as your street address serves for your house. Just like you would address a letter to send in the mail, computers use the IP address to send data to a specific computer on a network. Without a unique IP address, you would not be able to communicate with other devices, users, and computers on the Internet.

An IP address uses a set of 4 numbers, ranging from 0 to 255, separated by periods. An example would be 72.50.253.121. Also, did you know that instead of a domain name for a website, like www.MyImOn.com, you can enter the actual IP address into the website browser. But, since it would be hard to remember the unique set of numbers for each website you wanted to visit, your computer translates each website URL into the specific IP address for you.

Interested to find out what your computer’s IP address is?  It’s easy. Here are instructions from http://smallbusiness.chron.com.