There are 65,536 ports numbered from 0 to 65535. Ports 0 through 1023 are called the well-known ports and are assigned to commonly used services, and 1024 through 49151 are called the registered ports. Anything from 49152 to 65535 is free to be used by application vendors. TCP/IP applications combine the hosts IP address with the port number in order to communicate. This combination is known as a socket.