Thirty years of "what's my IP" — and a whole new ipcow
For three decades ipcow.com did one thing: it told you your IP address. Today we're celebrating with a complete rebrand — new look, new colors, a new cow — and a whole fleet of privacy-first IP, DNS and email tools.
For thirty years, ipcow.com answered one question, instantly, for anyone who asked:
What’s my IP address?
No login. No ads worth mentioning. No fuss. You typed the address, and there was your number staring back at you. Generations of sysadmins, network engineers, gamers configuring port-forwards, and curious people double-checking their VPN all passed through this little page. That heritage is the whole reason we exist — and it’s exactly what we didn’t want to lose.
Today, we’re keeping the promise and changing almost everything else.
A new look, a new cow
ipcow has a new identity: a calm, earthy moss-green palette, big bold type, a light background that flows from gentle grey into white, and — of course — a proper cow. Our mark is now a clean vector cow face, the same friendly character you’ll see in your browser tab.
The redesign isn’t decoration for its own sake. Most “what’s my IP” sites look like they were last touched in 2009 and are buried under three layers of ad networks. We think you deserve a page that’s genuinely pleasant to use — fast, calm, readable on your phone first, and free of anything that tracks you.
Your IP, front and centre — both stacks
The headline act still gets top billing, but now it shows both your IPv4 and IPv6 addresses at once, centered and impossible to miss. It’s the first thing you see, the way it should be.
A whole fleet of tools
Knowing your IP is just the start. ipcow now ships a growing toolkit, all running on our own infrastructure:
- IP — What’s My IP, CIDR calculator, IP range → CIDR
- DNS — DNS lookup, reverse DNS (PTR), CAA check — resolved over Quad9 by default
- Email — MX, SPF, DMARC and DKIM checks for the records that actually matter
- RDAP — modern registry data for IPs and domains, straight from the source
Every tool is also a clean JSON endpoint with a copy-paste curl recipe, so the same
checks you run by hand can drop straight into a script.
Privacy is the default, not a setting
The principles that carried us here aren’t changing:
- No trackers and no analytics that identify you.
- No big-tech round-trips — DNS goes to Quad9, RDAP to the registries, geolocation to self-hosted data. Nothing is quietly routed through Google, Microsoft or Apple.
- We don’t phone your lookups to anyone. What you check is your business.
What’s next
This is a launch, not a finish line. On the roadmap: monitoring subscriptions, metered API access, a blacklist/DNSBL sweep, and a suite of connection tests — speed, websocket, sound and webcam — for when you need to prove it’s the network and not you.
Thanks for thirty years. Here’s to the next thirty.
— The ipcow team