IP Address:-
An Internet Protocol address is a unique numerical name that every electronic device connected to a computer network has. You can think of an IP address as being similar to your home address. It is specific to that particular device and serves as a way to identify and locate these devices.
Classification of IP Address
An IP address is classified into the following types:
1. Public IP Address: This address is available publicly and it is assigned by your network provider to your router, which further divides it to your devices. Public IP Addresses are of two types,
Dynamic IP Address: When you connect a smartphone or computer to the internet, your Internet Service Provider provides you an IP Address from the range of available IP Addresses. Now, your device has an IP Address and you can simply connect your device to the Internet and send and receive data to and from your device. The very next time when you try to connect to the internet with the same device, your provider provides you with different IP Addresses to the same device and also from the same available range. Since IP Address keeps on changing every time when you connect to the internet, it is called a Dynamic IP Address.
Static IP Address: Static address never changes. They serve as a permanent internet address. These are used by DNS servers. What are DNS servers? Actually, these are computers that help you to open a website on your computer. Static IP Address provides information such as device is located on which continent, which country, which city, and which Internet Service Provider provides internet connection to that particular device. Once, we know who is the ISP, we can trace the location of the device connected to the internet. Static IP Addresses provide less security than Dynamic IP Addresses because they are easier to track.
2. Private IP Address: This is an internal address of your device which are not routed to the internet and no exchange of data can take place between a private address and the internet.
3. Shared IP addresses: Many websites use shared IP addresses where the traffic is not huge and very much controllable, they decide to rent it to other similar websites so to make it cost-friendly. Several companies and email sending servers use the same IP address (within a single mail server) to cut down the cost so that they could save for the time the server is idle.
4. Dedicated IP addresses: A dedicated IP Address is an address used by a single company or an individual which gives them certain benefits using a private Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate which is not in the case of a shared IP address. It allows to access the website or log in via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) by IP address instead of its domain name. It increases the performance of the website when the traffic is high. It also protects from a shared IP address that is black-listed due to spam
Types of IP Address
IP Address is of two types:
1. IPv4: Internet Protocol version 4. It consists of 4 numbers separated by the dots. Each number can be from 0-255 in decimal numbers. But computers do not understand decimal numbers, they instead change them to binary numbers which are only 0 and 1. Therefore, in binary, this (0-255) range can be written as (00000000 – 11111111). Since each number N can be represented by a group of 8-digit binary digits. So, a whole IPv4 binary address can be represented by 32-bits of binary digits. In IPv4, a unique sequence of bits is assigned to a computer, so a total of (2^32) devices approximately = 4,294,967,296 can be assigned with IPv4.
IPv4 can be written as:
189.123.123.90
2. IPv6: But, there is a problem with the IPv4 address. With IPv4, we can connect only the above number of 4 billion devices uniquely, and apparently, there are much more devices in the world to be connected to the internet. So, gradually we are making our way to IPv6 Address which is a 128-bit IP address. In human-friendly form, IPv6 is written as a group of 8 hexadecimal numbers separated with colons(:). But in the computer-friendly form, it can be written as 128 bits of 0s and 1s. Since, a unique sequence of binary digits is given to computers, smartphones, and other devices to be connected to the internet. So, via IPv6 a total of (2^128) devices can be assigned with unique addresses which are actually more than enough for upcoming future generations.
IPv6 can be written as:
2011:0bd9:75c5:0000:0000:6b3e:0170:8394