Confused with iptables documentation

I am reading this

1)In the section Making changes persistent, it introduce me two commands iptables-save and iptables-restore. But then right after that it said "upon stopping the service, the current iptables Rules are saved in a file, and upon starting the service, this file is restored. the affected files are /etc/sysconfig/iptables" So I assume I don't need to do iptables-save and iptables-restore if the machine is shut down properly?

2) just to be sure iptables --list only shows the configuration in /etc/sysconfig/iptables not the current configuration right?

I am 99% sure that's the case, but I am about to shutdown a prod box with an up time of 350+ days. I want to be sure.

EDIT:

When I inspect iptables.dump the rules is in terms of IP not hostname. that also means if the ip of the recipient change the iptables wouldn't work properly. How can i fix that? or it's suppose to be like that for security purposes.