Hi everyone. This relatively easy question came in today:
“How do I find out the IP address of a particular web site?”
The simplest way that most folks will remember is to use something called “Ping”. Ping is a basic network tool that checks if a computer or device is reachable over a network (like the Internet) and measures how long it takes for a message to go there and back. It sends a small packet of data and waits for a reply — like saying “Hello, are you there?” and timing how fast the response comes back.
The trick is, that using this command forces the computer you are using to ask the Domain Name Service (the telephone book of the Internet) what address to use. Therefore we learn the address!!
If you are a Windows user, click on the Windows Start, then type ‘cmd’ in the search window, then select the Command Prompt:
This opens the Windows Command line:
If you are a Linux or MAC user – simply open a “Terminal”.
Now type in ‘ping www.cellstream.com‘ replacing www.cellstream.com with the web site you are attempting to find out the IP address of.
The result will be a ping to an IP address received from the DNS server. You will see the IP address displayed, and successful pings, of course.
See my example below where we discover the IP address of www.cellstream.com is 206.189.178.82:
The answer above is an IPv4 address.
What happens if the system you are pinging is IPv6. You may see something like this:
Above we see the IPv6 address: 2604:a880:800:a1::7e4:8001 for netscionline.com.
Another way to discover the IP address of a site is to use the ‘nslookup’ command. You can read more about that here.
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