IP Addresses There are countless servers on the internet, so when your browser (the program used to access websites) wants to find a particular website, it needs to figure out which particular server houses the website it wants to display. We said earlier that servers are like houses for web content, and just like real houses, they each have a unique address called an IP Address, which stands for Internet Protocol Address. (In truth every computer connected to the internet has an IP address of its own, but we'll keep our focus on servers for now.) IP addresses are numerical identifiers for computers on the internet. Unfortunately, IP Addresses are long strings of numbers and dots (for instance 123.456.78.89), which aren't that easy for us humans to remember. Imagine if you had to remember an address like that for every website you ever wanted to visit! Lucky for us, there is a system called DNS (Domain Name System) whose job it is to make things easier. Let's return to our metaphor of the server as a house. I may not remember the address of a place I want to go, but if I remember the name of the place I can turn to a directory like Google Maps or an old-school phone-book to lookup the actual street number. DNS is like that phone-book. All I have to remember is the site's domain name.