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Every website, email account, etc, on the Internet is hosted on at least one computer (server). Each server has a unique IP address which is nothing but a set of numbers, such as "207.142.131.235" . To access a particular internet service, one can specify its IP address in an appropriate application, such as an FTP client; however because it is difficult to remember numbers, an IP address can be associated with a fully qualified host name (a domain name), such as "www.wikipedia.org". Domain names also provide a persistent address for some service when it is necessary to move to a different server, which would have a different IP address.
Article from Wikipedia licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.

Last Updated August 11, 2005