What Is An IP Address & Why Do I Need It?
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An IP address is the numerical address to a location on a server. It is where your website “lives.” You have an address of a residence where you live. Your office where you work has a physical address. The nice pretty graphics that appear when someone types in your domain name also have a physical address. Those graphics, images, content, and text don’t just “appear” there. Those graphics, images, content, and text have a “home.” That home is their IP address.
If your website utilizes shared server space, you along with several other people “share” the same IP address. Please visit our separate article “Shared versus Dedicated IP Address” for more details on that subject. There are issues you should be aware of should you decide to have a shared IP address.
At one time, rather than using domain names to locate a website, the IP address was used instead. Well, long IP address consisting of several digits are very hard to remember, cumbersome to write down, and just not much fun at all. So, the solution to that was the development of domain names to avoid using direct IP addresses.
There are certain circumstances that still dictate using the IP address to access server space. More on that later in this article. So imagine if you wanted to go to one of our websites, such as penneylayne.com but there were no domain names. Well then, you’d have to type in a very long and inconvenient number in a format such as: 99.123.45.67 (fictitious for this example.)
When a hosting client comes to us and wants to move their site from their current hosting service to our hosting service, we offer them a way to avoid site down time. This is achieved by our creating the new website in a “temporary” location. In other words, we create their “domain space” on a different server and create the site files and future website there. There are specific steps involved in this process; this is condensed methodology for the purpose of the blog.
The entire time the new site building takes place, the customer’s domain name still points to their current hosting service. We leave the name servers pointing there until we are ready to “repoint” the site to its new location.
During the time that the NEW site is being created and edited on the temporary URL server, we cannot view the pages we are editing and writing by typing in the customer’s domain name. Why? Because it is still pointed to the current host. So in order to view our changes and additions to the new site, we must access them utilizing the IP address, directly accessing the server space itself.
In other words, the temporary “domain area” we worked in was something like:
http://12.34.567.89/~cpaneluserid/adminarea
The above IP address was utilized in lieu of the standard:
http://thedomainname.com/adminarea
To view our ongoing editing and changes at the temporary site, we used:
http://12.34.567.89/~cpaneluserid
The standard way of viewing the site, and the way it is viewed after repointing would be:
http://domainname.com
In summary, while accessing a website via an IP address may seem antiquated, there are times when it is also quite beneficial. See you on the web!…….by Laura Brown, Penney Layne Graphics