IP address

IP stands for Internet Protocol, which is the set of rules that makes it possible for devices to communicate over the Internet. With billions of people accessing the Internet every day, unique identifiers are necessary to keep track of who is doing what. The Internet Protocol solves this by assigning IP numbers to every device accessing the Internet. Every assigned number is an IP address.

In practice there are two versions for IP Addresses:

• IPv4, and
• IPv6.

Hostnames (more specifically, FQDNs) can be resolved to IP Addresses using DNS.