A port is a communication endpoint on a computer or network device that is used to identify a specific process or service. When data is sent over a network, it is broken down into small packets, and each packet is sent to its destination based on the IP address of the destination device and the port number.
Icecast uses ports to communicate with clients (like media players or web browsers) that want to connect to the server and listen to the audio streams. You will receive a port that is specific to your Streaming aaccount.
When a client wants to connect to an Icecast server and listen to an audio stream, it establishes a connection to the server by specifying the server's IP address and port number. For example, if the server's hostname is "stream1.hippynet.co.uk" and the port number is 8000, the client would connect to "stream1.hippynet.co.uk:8000". Once the connection is established, the client can access the audio streams that are available on the server by specifying the appropriate mountpoint.
It's worth noting that if you have a firewall on your network or on your server, you need to make sure that the port of your server is open to allow the incoming connections, otherwise the clients won't be able to connect to the serve (i.e. people will not be able to listen to your stream. For this purpose Hippynet also provide a streaming proxy that can be used to listen without needing to specify specific ports.
