The ping utility looks for IP addresses of websites and other types of active network devices. Ping attempts to contact the site by name and reports back the IP address it finds, along with other information about the connection.

Ping is a command prompt command in Windows. For example, to find the IP address of Example.com on a desktop computer, use the command line interface instead of the graphical interface and enter the command:

The command returns a result similar to the following, which includes the IP address:

Many large websites do not return connection information in response to ping commands as a security measure. However, you will still see the IP address of the site. The ping method will fail if the website is temporarily unavailable or if the computer used to perform the ping is not connected to the Internet.