What is My IP Address
Your IP is your digital Identity and reveals important information about you.
What Your IP Address Can Reveal About You And Your Online Activities
- Your real location can easily be deduced via your IP address. Other information includes your online history, your physical address, and the places and things you’re interested in.
- Your metadata can be stored and sold off to marketing agencies who can then create personalized ads especially tailored for you. Metadata can also be shared with the government and other surveillance agencies.
- Hackers can learn all about you if they get access to your IP address. Eavesdropping over public Wi-Fi hotspots isn’t uncommon. Your private activities can be monitored or stolen, which may lead to compromised personal accounts, or blackmailing attempts by hackers.
- You may be restricted from accessing certain websites on the internet. These restrictions could be imposed by the government. Similarly, some websites themselves may block traffic from certain countries. Hiding your IP address is the best solution in this case.
- When you transfer any files over the web, there is a risk of them being accessed by a third-party who may use the information for malicious purposes. Being anonymous on the web is the only solution here!
What is An IP Address
An Internet Protocol address, more commonly known as an IP address is a unique identity assigned to every device or computer that connects to the internet. IPs that connect directly to the internet are called Public IPs.
As of now, two versions of IP address are in use: IP Version 4 (IPv4) and IP Version 6 (IPv6). Both these versions are tasked with the same responsibility: to uniquely identify any device connection to the Internet, based on its location.
A better version of IPv4 was needed to address the issue of shortage of IPs in the near future. So, in 1995 IPv6 was introduced to make sure that there would be enough IP address for devices connecting to the internet.
Every internet user needs a public IP to connect to the internet. Usually, the public IP is provide by a user's Internet Sservice Provider (ISP), which allows the user to connect to the internet.
What is a Private IP
Private networks like the ones at schools, offices, universities, homes etc. use private IP addresses to communicate with other devices connected to the same private network. These devices do not connect directly to the internet, but first connect to the server of the network, and the server then connects to the internet.
Private IPs are usually assigned by servers used to establish a private network.
Who Needs Private IP?
A private IP address is needed by a user who wants to be anonymous, secure and private on the internet. Private IPs are not bought or sold. Companies like PureVPN reserve a pool of private IPs for themselves, which in turn allows their users to connect to the internet.
PureVPN Provides Private IP Address
Since PureVPN is a private network, PureVPN users are assigned a private IP by PureVPN's servers. These private IPs are not used by anyone else in the world except PureVPN.
Public and private IPs are further divided into two types: Dynamic and Static IPs. If an IP is static, it means that every time a user or device connects to the internet, they will get the same IP. This is not the case with dynamic IPs, since they keep changing as per the availability of IPs.
PureVPN provides dedicated/static IPs as an add-on. You can select this add-on while you are going through the checkout process at PureVPN.