What is an IP Address – How to Hide Your Online Activities

September 13, 2021 By Nick Anderson No Comments 6 minutes

The internet, as we know it, is not made up of a central server giving out the internet to devices connected to it – it’s billions of devices connected worldwide. Some devices are clients such as yourself who are visitors, and some computers are servers that host something on the internet (e.g, a website).

What is an IP address

The vastness of the internet is overwhelming. With so many devices, it needs some key identifiers to communicate with each other. An IP address provides the unique identifier required to communicate.

IP address comprises of numerical and hexadecimal numbers. Every device on the internet has an IP address that serves as its unique identifier in the digital ocean. The device that you are currently using has one, and FastestVPN’s website has one. So, you are able to connect to different servers and hosts on the internet with the correct IP address, just like the postman knows the right address on the street.

But that’s not the end of our discussion. There are more things you need to know about IP addresses.

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How Does Internet Communication Work?

Now that you have understood how the IP address serves as a unique identifier let’s take a look at how the process of communication unfolds.

The idea that people will have to remember each IP address to visit their favorite websites is very inconvenient, if not completely unrealistic. It’s why we have alphanumeric names. Instead of remembering the IP address for FastestVPN, we can simply write fastestvpn.com and be on the destination. Here, the name FastestVPN serves as a mask for the actual IP address, and .com defines the extension, which stands for commercial.

The right address is determined by what’s called a DNS server. It’s an address book of the internet that keeps records of all domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. Internet service providers have DNS servers that handle DNS requests and route the user to the desired location.

When you send a request to open fastestvpn.com, the request is pushed to the internet service provider. Then, the ISP looks up the DNS tables to determine the correct IP address and delivers the webpage back to the user.

How to Hide Online Activity

Use a VPN

A VPN works in the same manner, but with added security. When you connect to a VPN server, it handles all the requests and delivers the relevant web pages to you. Data is encrypted until it reaches the VPN server. Hence, the ISP cannot see what websites you visit. It makes your browsing experience private and lets you spoof your location by connecting to a VPN server in a different country. Even if you’re not sure about whether your IP address is changed after connecting to FastestVPN, there is a way for you to check it.

The fact that internet communication is encrypted means that third parties cannot intervene and sniff your data for valuable information.

FastestVPN has its own DNS server to handle DNS requests. So, the ISP is truly not involved here.

Tor Browser

The Onion network is a decentralized network of users participating to act as nodes. The fundamental principle of the onion network is anonymity. The Dark Web is a part of the internet that resides on the onion network, and it requires a special browser called Tor to access it.

The Tor browser encrypts your internet traffic and tunnels it through three nodes on the network before reaching the destination. Encryption is used throughout the process. A node can either know where the request came from or the destination, but not both.

You can also use Tor over VPN to eliminate any node from learning your identity because internet traffic will always come through the VPN server first.

DNS Over HTTPS (DoH)

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a web protocol that encrypts data packets for transmission. While much of the web today uses HTTPS, the DNS queries are not encrypted. It means that while the contents of the data packets are hidden, your ISP can see the DNS queries and track what websites you visit.

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) eliminates that concern by encrypting DNS queries. Web browsers like Mozilla Firefox have this feature.

Types of IP Addresses

These might feel overwhelming terms at first, but allow us to simplify them for you.

Both are internet protocols designed for assigning IP addresses to the billions of devices in the world. The difference is their capacity to deal with the evergrowing number of devices.

As a 32-bit address, IPV4 can accommodate about 4 billion addresses. A part of that IP pool is not available for the public. While 4 billion seems like a huge number – and it is –we are ever so operating on the edges of IPV4’s limit. Some IP addresses get recovered, but there is real concern over IPV4’s diminishing capacity.

Enter IPV6. The Internet Protocol Version 6 was introduced as the successor to IPV4. As a 128-bit address, it can accommodate over a trillion IP addresses.

Here is an example:

16.254.1 (IPv4)
2001:0DB8:AC10:FE01 (IPv6)

IPV4 is represented in decimals, in four blocks of 8-bits; also known as an octet. IPV6 has hexadecimal representation. Both of them are converted into binary by computers for translation.

You can check your IP address by heading over to our What is My IP page and see the details.

Why VPN is the Best Tool to Hide Online Activity

Ultimately, when you weigh every option, a VPN is undoubtedly the best privacy tool. It encrypts your internet communication and the DNS queries. It tunnels internet traffic safely through the VPN server, thus masking your identity from the destination.

More than just a privacy tool, a VPN also allows you to access geo-restricted content from anywhere in the world and change your IP address.

FastestVPN makes using a VPN as simple as turning on a switch. The VPN app gives you access to over 550 VPN servers worldwide and connect with them instantly. With FastestVPN’s strict zero-logs policy, you can rest easy knowing that your activity is never be monitored.