This is your IP address: how you are seen by others on the internet
Every device online gets an address, the same way a house needs one for post to arrive. Here's yours, read straight off this connection — nothing is stored.
IPv4 address
detecting…
IPv6 address
detecting…
The path back to this server
A traceroute lists every router your data hops through on its way somewhere. Browsers aren't allowed to send the low-level packets a traceroute needs — that's a security boundary, not a bug — so we can't run one silently in the background. Run the command below in your own terminal instead, and we'll explain the columns you'll see.
traceroute myipaddress.uk
Paste that into Terminal (macOS/Linux) or Command Prompt (Windows, use tracert) and press enter. Each line it prints is one hop.
Plain-English glossary
- What is an IP address?
- A number that identifies your connection on the internet, the same way a street address identifies a building. It's how other computers know where to send data back to you.
- What is an IPv4 address?
- The older, shorter style of address, written as four numbers separated by dots (like 203.0.113.42). There are only about 4 billion of these, and we've mostly run out, which is why IPv6 exists.
- What is an IPv6 address?
- A newer, much longer address format, written in groups of letters and numbers separated by colons. It was built so the internet never runs out of addresses again. Not every network uses it yet — if we couldn't detect one for you, that's normal.
- What's the difference between a public and private address?
- Your router has one public address that the outside world sees (shown above), and it hands out separate private addresses to each device in your home. That's why your phone and laptop can share one internet connection but still be told apart.
- What is an ISP?
- Short for Internet Service Provider — the company that connects your home or phone to the internet, such as BT, Virgin Media, or EE. It's usually who assigned you the address shown above.
- What is a hop in networking?
- One stop on the journey your data takes. Data rarely travels directly — it passes through several routers along the way, and each one it touches counts as a hop.
- What is latency?
- How long a signal takes to travel, measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Lower is faster. A traceroute shows the latency to each hop, so you can see exactly where a slow connection is losing time.
- What is a packet?
- Data isn't sent in one piece — it's broken into small chunks called packets, each stamped with where it came from and where it's going, then reassembled when it arrives.
- What is DNS?
- Short for Domain Name System — the internet's phone book. It's what translates a name like myipaddress.uk into the numeric address computers actually use to find it.
- What is an ASN?
- Short for Autonomous System Number — an ID for the network your provider operates. It's how the internet's routers know which company to hand your traffic to.