What makes up a web address?

At its most basic, an internet address is simply a number that is represented using 32 bits. A 32-bit number can be any number between 0 and 4294967295.

To make it a bit easier for humans to "manage" these numbers that uniquely identify every computer on the Internet, this 32-bit number is broken up into four 8-bit numbers. An 8-bit number can be anywhere in the range of 0 to 255.

For example, the IP address that I am responding to this question is 24.147.179.70.

The equipment that makes up the Internet (routers and switches) use these 32-bit numbers to determine how to move the data from one IP address to another. Every piece of data that moves along the Internet has a a small "tag" that specifies the destination IP address for that piece of data, and these routers and switches move the data along to its ultimate destination.

Its important to understand that the "names" that you see on the Internet (for example www.whitehouse.gov, which takes you to the website for the White House in Washington, DC) are separate from the Internet addresses that the name represents.

Computers on the Internet use something called DNS (Domain Name Server) to convert a name like www.whitehouse.gov to the Internet address that is used by the web server for a given name.