SIMPLE WAY TO FIND IP ADDRES OF A WEBSITE

Each Web site on the Internet possesses at least one Internet Protocol (IP) address. Knowing a Web site IP address can be useful to determine its physical location, but this address is not automatically shown in Web browsers. How can you find the IP address of a Web site?

Answer: First, you can use the ping utility to look up Web site IP addresses. Ping attempts to contact the Web site by name and will report back the IP address it finds. For example, to find the IP address of about.com, entering the command

ping about.com

will return a result similar to the following that contains the IP address:

Pinging about.com [207.241.148.80] with 32 bytes of data: . . .

Note that many larger Web sites do not return replies to ping commands, but the site IP address can usually still be obtained. The ping method will fail if the Web site is temporarily unreachable or if the computer used to perform the ping is not connected to the Internet.

The Internet WHOIS System

An alternative method to find Web site IP addresses relies on the Internet WHOIS system. WHOIS is a database that tracks registration information for Web sites including the owner and IP address.

To look up Web site IP addresses with WHOIS, simply visit one of the many public sites (like whois.net or networksolutions.com) that offer WHOIS database query services. Searching for a particular site name like about.com, for example, produces a result similar to the following:

Current Registrar: REGISTER.COM, INC.
IP Address: 207.241.148.80 (ARIN & RIPE IP search) . . .

In the WHOIS method, note that the IP addresses are stored statically in a database and thus do not require the Web site actually be online or reachable over the Internet.

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