IP address

An IP address is an exact designation of location, used by the Internet Protocol. IP addresses look like the following:

207.46.197.32

An address such as the above typically refers to a single host computer connected to the internet. An address is used by computer software to unambiguously identify a remote computer (called a host in internet parlance) for information exchange by one of several internet application protocols.

Human beings seldom use these numerical addresses and instead use their more human-friendly aliases, so-called domain names, or specifically DNS names]. The correspondence between an IP address and an internet domain name is registered in the Domain Name Service (DNS) by the internet. So the above address refers, as of February 2009, to a host computer owned by Microsoft Corporation, and its corresponding domain name is:

microsoft.com