What is an Internet Protocol (IP) address, and why is it important to your online life?
IP addresses are how computers talk to each other and know where to route your data packets. Think of it almost as the address of your house; without it, how would your mailman ever find you?
These addresses are assigned on local area networks (LAN) in your home, as well as wide area networks (WAN), which is better known as the Internet. There are things such as dedicated IPs where a website pays an extra fee for an address that is excllusive to them, but if you are on a shared host, numerous websites will share the same address.
Now, when you log in to the Web, you are also assigned an IP, and while it is unusual for it to be a unique, don’t think the face you are sharing an address with others that you are anonymous while you surf. If you go to Amazon.com, if they wanted to know whom on a shared IP it was, they could get a court order and demand your Internet Service Provider what account during that time, on that IP, was going to Amazon.
It pays to know your IP address so that when you need to look up who is accessing your website or email, you can see which instances were you, and which ones were people you don’t know.
