How many bytes are contained within an IP address?

An IP address, specifically an IPv4 address, is composed of 32 bits. When converting this into bytes, it's important to remember that 1 byte consists of 8 bits. Therefore, to determine the number of bytes in an IPv4 address, you can divide the total number of bits by the number of bits per byte:

32 bits ÷ 8 bits/byte = 4 bytes.

This means that an IPv4 address contains 4 bytes. Each byte in the IPv4 address corresponds to one of the four octets typically represented in decimal format (for example, 192.168.1.1), where each octet represents a value from 0 to 255.

In contrast, IPv6 addresses, which are becoming more common due to the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, consist of 128 bits or 16 bytes, which is why other options may suggest a larger number. However, for the specific context of IPv4, the answer is 4 bytes.