Want to store IP addresses in database and still using VARCHAR(15)? You can actually store IP addresses as integer values because using INT you go down to 4 bytes of space and have a fixed size field.
As the range of a IP Addresses are 32 bit unsigned integer you can use your column as UNSIGNED INT.
In your MySql query you can use INET_ATON() to convert and IP to an integer, and INET_NTOA() for vice versa.
In PHP, ip2long() and long2ip() are same as above functions.
Example to store IP Addresses:
$sql = “UPDATE tbl SET ip = INET_ATON(‘{$_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]}’) WHERE `tbl_column` = ‘$id'”;
