what is port number, in computer network terms
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Imagine a big apartment building. It would have a single street address right? Like 445 Main Street? This is similar to an IP address for a computer. It determines “where the computer exists on the internet”.
What if I wanted to send a letter to an individual in that apartment block? How would I do that? Well, they’d likely have an apartment number right? So their full address might be “Apartment 12, 445 Main Street”.
This is pretty much was a computer port it, it’s the ‘apartment number’ for a specific service that exists on a computer.
So, say you’re running a simple web server on a computer, usually that service “listens” to port 80. So any network traffic that finds its way to port 80 on that computer is ‘delivered’ to the webserver to process.
There are a number of ‘standard’ port numbers for services such as HTTP, FTP, RDP, etc., but it’s often possible to reassign port numbers.
When you type an address into a browser such as [www.reddit.com](http://www.reddit.com), your browser implicitly sends that data to port 80. However if you needed to specific a specific port, you can add it to the URL using a colon deliminator such as [www.reddit.com:80/](https://www.reddit.com:80/)
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