Domain Name vs. IP Address: What’s the Connection?

Are you confused about the relationship between (and difference between) domain names and IP addresses? You’re not alone. If you’re familiar with the internet at all, which you likely are since you are reading this blog, you’ve no doubt worked with domain names before. It’s the address at the top of this page, in the URL bar. Between after the prefix (http://www.) of any website, you’ll find the domain name associated with that website, which we’ve acquired for our blog through domain name registration.

In practical application, a domain name is the “address” you use to find the website you’re looking for, but in reality, it has a much more static address, known as the IP address. What does this mean? Well, IP address is a unique combination of numbers that are assigned to every individual entity that’s at all connected to the internet. Your computer has one, and the server on which a website is stored has one, and even mobile phones that connect to the web are assigned one. They’re a way to differentiate who does what online, as well as where everything is located.

How Do Domain Name and IP Address Relate?

Well, it wouldn’t really do to type in a long string of numbers when you want to visit your favorite blogs, read the news, or find out about the weekend weather forecast, so domain names are used as more user-friendly locators of IP addresses where websites are stored.

So, for example, say you have a website. You therefore will find out the IP address for the server where you’re storing your files (or rather, your UK web hosting provider is storing the files). It might be formatted something like this: xxx.xx.xxx.xxx.

No one wants to type that into a URL bar, so you do a domain name search to find the perfect domain name for your site, and get your UK web hosting company to set it up so that when people type in your domain name, they’ll be taken to your site.

The great thing about domain names is that you can have more than one domain name directed at the same IP address. And if you change web hosts, you can build a new site at a new IP address (or move your existing site files to a new IP address), and have the domain name direct to the new address. Your website visitors don’t have to know that you changed servers: to them, they type in your catchy, user-friendly domain name and are directed to your UK website, the same as always.

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