An IP address is the unique number that identifies a device on a network, so that data sent across the internet knows exactly where to go. Every server, phone and laptop that connects gets one. When your browser asks a website for a page, that request is stamped with both your IP address and the server’s, the same way a letter carries a sender and a recipient.
Think of it as the postal address for a building. The street and number tell the mail carrier precisely where to deliver, and without it the package would just wander. Because long numbers are hard to remember, the Domain Name System acts as the phone book that turns a name like topdevs.nl into the matching IP address. Those name-to-number links are stored in DNS records that you can update when a site moves to a new server.
There are two formats in use. IPv4 looks like 93.184.216.34, and because there are only about four billion of them, the world has been moving to IPv6, which is far larger and written as a longer string of digits and letters.
Addresses also split into public and private. Your laptop at home holds a private IP like 192.168.0.5 that only exists inside your own network, while your router shares one public IP with the outside world. On busy sites a single name often points at several servers behind a load balancer, so the address you reach can quietly differ from one visit to the next.
At TopDevs we manage the IP addresses and DNS behind a client’s domains so the right traffic always reaches the right server, even when we move things in the background.
