Find A Website’s IP Address
I started this blog when my whole focus was about learning and sharing, and since I've had a job, I've neglected the poor thing. Noo! I'll try to be better. I tend to make too big of a deal out of blog ideas and then put them off, instead of just regularly and spontaneously sitting down and just sharing random thoughts/tidbits. I tend to wait until I have a great big lesson, as though I'm planning a web design course or something. I think I'm going to attempt to simply share a thing or two a week. They don't need to be major.
So, for today's small little tidbit, I'm going to share something that I knew, but forgot about and was reminded only a few minutes ago while watching a Youtube clip. Sometimes, one needs to find the IP address of a website. Maybe you're really interested in the numbers that represent your own website, but most likely, you need it for some sort of functional purpose.
A recent example of this has happened at my job when we had built a new website for a client on our own server. We had simply pointed their domain name from their previous hosting account to their new hosting account with us. It turned out that some of the company's employees had saved some bookmarks to certain pages of their previous website on their desktops, and when we pointed the domain name to new servers, they couldn't access their page anymore...even though they hadn't yet canceled their old hosting account. The files were still on it, but the domain name wasn't pointing to that server anymore.
So we told them that as long as they still had access to their hosting account, we could probably get the specific directory moved to the new server. We had the proper FTP username and password, but the domain name wasn't going to work. We needed their IP address in order to connect to that server. They didn't know what their IP address was.
When I need a client's IP address and they don't know it off the top of their head, which is rather normal and probably healthy, I was sending them to http://whatismyipaddress.com/, which is fine, but it's much faster and much more responsible to simply get the IP myself...and I forgot that I could use command prompt to do just that.
So, to all dorks, web designers and others, this is a really really simple way of getting a websites IP address:
How To Ping A Website for it's IP Address
Step 1: Open your command prompt. On my current computer using Windows XP, you just go to the Start menu, then click run. Type "cmd" (without the quotes) to open command prompt and click OK.
Step 2: Once your command prompt is open, type: ping websitename.com (don't actually type websitename.com. Type in the name of the website that you want to retrieve the IP address from.) So for example, you could type: ping arcandangle.com and it was display a few bits of information including the IP address.
That's it. I should mention that in the example I started with, I wouldn't be able to ping that client by their domain name and get their old IP address. It would have given me the current IP address that their domain name was pointing to, which would have been our own server. BUT, the lesson here is that before transferring a domain name, I could have pinged and recorded their IP address just in case I needed it in the future.