IP Address Lookup: Your IP, Any IP, and Reverse DNS

Where Is My IP, and What Can This Page Tell You?

Every request your browser makes carries a return address. That address belongs to your internet provider, not to you, and it is the only thing a website sees without being told anything else. The block at the top of this page is the answer to what is my ip: it reports the address our server observed on your connection, along with the country and time zone attached to that route. If you came here to check my ip before a VPN test, or to find my ip for a firewall rule, that number is the one to copy.

People type this job into a search box in a dozen shapes — ip lookup, ip lookup tool, ip address lookup tool, ip address search tool, ip search lookup, ip number lookup, ip number search, even ip add lookup — and every one of them describes what the second block does: take an address, say what kind of address it is, and ask DNS what name it answers to. Written without spaces the same request turns up as myip, whatsmyip, whoismyip or checkmyip; it is the same question either way.

What Is My IP ISP, and My IP and Location?

Two things people expect here are worth being straight about. Asking what is my ip isp means asking which company owns the block your address sits in — that comes from registry and routing data we do not load. Asking for my ip and location or my ip location means asking a geolocation database where that block is used. What you get instead is the country and time zone the request actually arrived with, which is enough to confirm a VPN exit or explain a timestamp, and honest about being nothing more.

Reverse DNS Lookup

Forward DNS turns a name into an address. A reverse dns lookup goes the other way: it asks for the PTR record published under the address, which is how a receiving mail server decides whether a sending host looks legitimate. The block above runs one for whatever you enter, so you can check reverse dns for a server you administer without opening a terminal.

On the command line the same reverse dns query is dig -x 8.8.8.8 or a reverse nslookup — nslookup 8.8.8.8. Windows users often write it as reverse ns lookup, and a dns reverse search and an ip reverse dns check mean exactly the same thing. Whether you lookup dns for ip here or in a shell, the query is identical: the address is reversed into a name under in-addr.arpa for IPv4 or ip6.arpa for IPv6, and that name is asked for a PTR record.

A missing PTR is not a failure. Home connections almost never have one worth reading, and cloud providers often leave the default. Reverse dns is only meaningful when somebody deliberately published a record.

Domain Name to IP

Type a host name instead of an address and the page resolves it: domain name to ip for the A records, and the AAAA records alongside them. Use it to find ip address of the website you are debugging, to check site ip address after a DNS change, or to confirm which domain ip address a CDN is currently handing out. Because the query runs from your browser against a public resolver, the answer reflects what your network sees, which is what makes it useful during a migration.

One resolution can return several addresses; large sites answer with a rotating set. Translating a domain name to ip address therefore gives you a snapshot, not a permanent fact, and the TTL beside each record says how long that snapshot is meant to last.

IPv6 Lookup

An ipv6 lookup works the same way as one for IPv4, with more room. Where IPv4 has 32 bits written as four decimal numbers, IPv6 has 128 written as eight hexadecimal groups, with one run of zeroes allowed to collapse into ::. This page expands that shorthand, so an ipv6 ip lookup shows you the full form, the decimal value of all 128 bits, and the range the address belongs to. Searches for ip6 lookup land in the same place; there is no separate tool for it.

Range Types

Not every valid address is reachable from the internet, and the range an address sits in is usually the answer to why something is not working:

• Public — routable on the internet. This is what a server sees when you connect.
• Private — 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16 and IPv6 fc00::/7. Used inside a network; a router translates them on the way out.
• Loopback — 127.0.0.0/8 and ::1. The machine talking to itself.
• CGNAT — 100.64.0.0/10. Carrier-grade NAT, shared between many subscribers of the same provider. If your router reports one of these, you have no public address of your own.
• Link-local — 169.254.0.0/16 and fe80::/10. What a device gives itself when DHCP fails.
• Reserved — documentation ranges, multicast, benchmarking blocks and the rest of the space the IETF has set aside.

Decimal, Hexadecimal and Binary

An IPv4 address is one 32-bit number wearing a dotted disguise: 8.8.8.8 is 134744072, or 0x08080808. Database columns, log formats and access-control lists often store the integer, so the conversion is shown for both versions — IPv6 simply produces a much longer number, since all 128 bits count.

IP Geolocation, and Why This Page Stops Short of It

Ip geolocation is the practice of mapping an address block to a place by combining registry records, routing tables and observed latency. It is what people mean by ip location, ip address location, an ip lookup location service, or the phrase ip and location in the same breath. Every product that offers an ip address with location — the technique is sometimes called ip geocoding — is reading from a licensed database that has to be refreshed constantly to stay even roughly right.

We do not load one. The results would be a city name that is frequently the wrong city, wrapped in licensing obligations, and the honest version of that feature is to say what we actually observe: the country and time zone of the route, and nothing about a street or a subscriber.

Questions

• How do you find an ip address?
  For your own, open this page: the address is read from the request your browser just made and shown at the top. For someone else's server, enter its domain name in the second block and read the A record. There is no way to look up the address of a person — only of a machine that has published one.
• How do i get my ip address on my own computer?
  The address shown here is the public one your provider assigns. The address your computer knows about is usually a private one behind a router: ipconfig on Windows, ip addr on Linux, or the network pane in macOS settings will show it, and it will normally start with 192.168 or 10.
• What is my ip number, and is that the same thing?
  Yes. An address is literally a number — 32 bits for IPv4, 128 for IPv6 — and the dots or colons are formatting. The decimal form in the results is the same value written without them.
• What is my public ip versus my local one?
  The public address is what the rest of the internet sees, and it belongs to your router or your provider. The local address is what your device uses inside your own network. They differ whenever there is a router in between, which is nearly always.
• What's my public ip address if I am on a VPN?
  It is the exit address of the VPN server, not your own. That is the point of the tunnel, and it is why this page is a quick way to confirm a VPN is actually carrying your traffic: load it before and after connecting and compare.
• Does my address change?
  Usually. Most home connections get a dynamic address that can change when the router restarts or the provider's lease expires. Business lines and servers often have a static one. If you need to find out my ip after a reconnection, reload this page — nothing is cached.
• Can I find my ip number for a device that is switched off?
  No. An address is a property of a live connection, not of hardware. Once a device disconnects, its address goes back into the pool and may be handed to somebody else within hours.