Windows – IP address visible in browser’s “Inspect Element”

iisipnetworkingwebserverwindows 8.1

I've recently started hosting my own website on a machine on my network.

Whenever anyone goes to my site and does "Inspect Element" my external IP address is visible to everyone. This seems like a huge issue..

I was wondering if there was some way to hide this so that everyone doesn't have that kind of direct access to my network.

If anyone needs to know, I've "purchased" my domain name from no-ip.com and I'm running Windows 8.1 and using IIS 8 to host the site.

Best Answer

No matter what you do your public IP address can easily be found via ping, traceroute or even DNS lookup. This is because computers use IP addresses to communicate with each other, so it must determine that from a DNS (Domain Name Server) in order to know where to connect to. For example, pinging Google displays:

PING www.google.com (74.125.239.114) 56(84) bytes of data.

Try typing http://74.125.239.114 into a web browser and see what happens. Much like how on your local network each machine has an IP address, the Internet is just a huge network of computers (routers usually) which all need a way to locate them -- their address! Just think how inefficient it would be to keep a database on your computer to match every site in the world with its IP address!

If you're concerned about security a great tip is to avoid using Windows -- especially if you're opening your machine up to the internet. I'd recommend dual booting any Linux distro and running an Apache web server, which is very easy to set up. It will take a bit more work but you'll find that Linux is much more suited to be any kind of server! Good luck, hope this helped!

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