My IP address

What your IP address tells a website

Every site you open receives your public IP address along with the request. From that one number it can work out a fair amount: the country, usually the region and city, the company that gave you the connection, and the network it belongs to. It also learns the time zone tied to that location and, often, a hostname your provider assigned to the line.

What it cannot read from an IP is your name, your street address or anything stored on your device. Those only reach a site when you type them in or sign in.

Public and private addresses

Your router hands out private addresses inside the home or office: ranges such as 192.168.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/8 and 172.16.0.0/12. Phones, laptops and TVs all sit on those. When any of them goes online, the router swaps the private address for one public address that the outside world sees. That swap is called NAT, and it is why every device at home shows the same IP on this page.

IPv4 and IPv6

IPv4 addresses look like 203.0.113.42: four numbers from 0 to 255. There are about 4.3 billion of them, and they ran out years ago, which is why providers reuse and share them. IPv6 addresses are longer, written in hexadecimal with colons, and the pool is practically endless. Many connections have both; a site picks one when you connect, and the page above shows the one it saw.

How accurate IP location is

Geolocation databases match address blocks to places using registry records, provider data and network measurements. The country is right almost every time. The city is a best guess: large providers route traffic through regional hubs, so a user can appear in a city a hundred kilometres away. Coordinates point to the centre of that area and never to a building.

If the location here looks off, the reason is usually the provider’s routing. Another service may show a different city because each one uses its own database.

Why your IP changes

Most home connections get a dynamic address. It can change after the router restarts, after a long disconnect or on the provider’s schedule. A fixed address is usually a paid option for people who run servers or need remote access to their network.

How to change your IP address

The quick way is to restart the router and see whether the provider hands out a new address. You can also ask the provider for a new one. To appear from another address on demand, connect through a proxy server: the site then sees the proxy’s IP. For work that sends many requests, such as collecting data or managing several accounts, people use a rotating proxy pool where each request leaves from a fresh address.

About the WebRTC and time zone checks

Browsers use WebRTC for calls and video chats, and it can report your address directly. When you browse through a proxy, the WebRTC test shows whether the browser still exposes another public IP. The time zone check compares the zone of your system clock with the zone of the IP location. A mismatch is normal when you use a proxy in another region; antidetect browser profiles usually align the two.