Each and every website on the internet has a unique IP address assigned to them depending on the server that they are hosted on. The IP address also defines the location of the server of the website. When you enter a URL into your browser, your browser contacts your network’s DNS or Domain Name System which is a database of all the websites and IP addresses. After getting the IP address from the DNS, your browser will then show you the website that is hosted on that IP address.
The time taken for your browser to connect to your DNS to get the status of the IP address of a website is known as Ping. In more technical terms, it is called Latency.
As per Wikipedia:
Latency is a time interval between the stimulation and response, or, from a more general point of view, a time delay between the cause and the effect of some physical change in the system being observed.
There are many reasons why one would want to find out the ping value of a certain website or an IP address. In this post, I will tell you how to ping a website or an IP address on Windows, MacOS or even Linux.
Let’s get started with Windows and then we will move on to MacOS and Linux.
Windows
Pinging a website or an IP address is very easy on Windows. All you need is the Command Prompt. To open a Command Prompt window, just go to the Start Menu and type CMD.
You will see Command Prompt as a result. Just open it and enter the following command.
ping <website or IP address>
This is all you have to do to ping a website or an IP address on Windows. If you are pinging an IP address that also includes a port, for example 192.168.0.1:8080 then just remove the port and ping the IP normally.
ping 192.168.0.1
MacOS
Pinging a website or an IP address on a Mac is just like pinging on Windows. But on a Mac, you have to use the Terminal instead of Command Prompt. Just enter the following command:
ping <website or IP address>
This will ping the website or the IP address that you mentioned in the command and you have to manually stop the pinging on MacOS unlike on Windows where the IP or the website is pinged just four times. To stop the pinging, just press the Control + C buttons simultaneously on Mac and the pinging will stop.
Linux
The process is actually same for Linux as well. You have Terminal on Linux based systems as well. Just start the Terminal and type the following command.
ping <website or IP address>
The pinging will work just like it does on a Mac based machine and to stop the pinging manually, all you need to do is press the Control + C buttons together.
Bonus: How to check your connection’s ping?
Now this is a bonus section that I decided to include since many people have to test their connections to check if the ping they’re getting is stable. You can just go to http://www.speedtest.net/ and test your connection for ping as well as your network speed.
This was a basic post that told you how to ping a website or an IP address on a Mac, Windows or a Linux based machine. You can check out our other tutorials to learn some more of the cool things you can do.
