What is My IP Location?

What is My IP Location?

An IP address is a unique address that is assigned to computing devices such as smartphones, tablets, and computers. It is used by the devices to communicate with each other over the internet. Your IP address can provide fairly strong indications of where a computer is geographically located. The internet comprises of different databases that contain such information in varying depths of accuracy. Although an IP Lookup tool is used to determine your IP location, it can never be 100% accurate due to a variety of factors. Some of these factors include where the IP has been registered, the location of ISP controls your IP address, cellular IPs, proxies etc.

You might fail to get reliable data if you are using a VPN or your internet service provider sends your internet traffic from a different location. Most individuals always have the perception that they will find the physical mailing address of the user's IP address once they carry out an IP address lookup. It is difficult to determine whether any IP address database will give you the actual physical postal address of a particular IP address. You will have to contact the Internet service provider about the IP address to find the exact physical address.

However, they may never give you the user's mailing address assigned to the IP unless you have some sort of legal documents that forces them to hand over the information. This is due to security reasons and they have full authority to protect the privacy of their clients. No single computing device can establish a connection to the internet without a public IP address. Every computer is assigned a public IP address by the ISP. There are two versions of internet protocols used today; IPv4 (32-bit) and IPv6 (128-bit).

The two primary types of IP addresses are public and private. To access the internet, you will use the public IP address as it is used to establish communications with other devices across different networks. The private IP address is used to connect to a local area network.

Geolocation is the pairing of an IP address to a geographical location. It is useful for individuals or companies having an e-commerce website as they want to know where their visitors are coming from. Although it might help you find a precise location of your traffic, it is very difficult to determine the exact location of a host when given its IP address.

The accuracy of an IP-based Geolocation database tends to vary depending on the database being used. Most Corporations, Academic institutions, and ISPs use location as a qualified hostname although it is not always the trend. The Reverse DNS translation is not always accurate as it depends on the correct configuration of the provider's DNS server. Other things to note is that the US domain names such as .org, .net or .com do not always mean that the host is situated in the United States. If you want to hide your exact location from malicious hackers and scammers, it is recommended to use the VPN services.