Every time you open a website, little parcels of data travel to your phone or laptop. They need an address to find you. That address is your IP address.
Think about how a parcel finds you. It doesn’t matter how good the courier is. Without an address on the label, it goes nowhere.
The internet works the same way. Everything you do online, a web page, a video, a message, is split into small parcels of data. Each parcel is labelled with where it’s going and where it came from. Those labels are IP addresses.
What one looks like
The common kind is four numbers with dots between them, like 192.168.1.10. A newer, longer kind (called IPv6) exists because the world ran out of the short ones.
Your home has two kinds
At home, your Wi-Fi router gives each device its own private address, like flat numbers inside one building. To the outside world, your whole home shares one public address: the building’s street address. The router keeps track of which parcel belongs to which flat.
What it isn’t
It isn’t your name. It isn’t your exact location either. Websites can usually guess your country or city from it, not your street.
It also isn’t permanent. Most home connections get a new one every so often.
Where the comparison breaks down
A house keeps its address for decades. IP addresses change. One can also be shared by many people at once, like everyone on the same café Wi-Fi.
How the words fit together
Every device needs an IP address. Numbers are hard to remember, so domain names like laymanterms.dev stand in for them. DNS is the lookup that turns the name back into the number. HTTPS is the sealed envelope your data travels in.
Your IP address can roughly reveal your town, not your house. It usually belongs to your internet provider's network and it changes from time to time.
When you'll hear it
“What's your IP?” Which address is your device using right now, so they can find it or let it in.
“That site is blocked by IP.” The site turns away anyone coming from certain addresses, often by country.
“Use a VPN to hide your IP.” Your traffic goes through someone else's address first, so websites see theirs instead of yours.
“Does this need a fixed IP address, or is a normal changing one fine?”
Try it yourselfReady to use it? The exact commands are on my other site, devcmds: Find your IP address ↗
