IPv4 Address Prices Hit Record Highs

IPv4 address prices have quietly reached levels that would have sounded unrealistic a decade ago. Whether you run a small VPS, operate a hosting platform, or manage an enterprise network, the cost of just one more /24 has become a real line item in your budget. The days when providers could hand out public IPv4 addresses freely with every server plan are gone. Today, almost every serious capacity or architecture discussion we have with customers at dchost.com includes at least one question about IP pricing, scarcity, or how long the current pool will last. In this article, I want to unpack what is actually driving IPv4 to record highs, how the transfer and leasing markets really work behind the scenes, and most importantly, concrete strategies you can use to keep projects affordable without blocking growth. If you are planning new services, migrations, or data center expansions, understanding the economics of IPv4 is now as important as CPU, RAM, and storage sizing.

IPv4 Address Prices Are Surging: What Actually Changed?

From a protocol perspective, nothing about IPv4 itself has changed. What changed is simple: the number of usable IPv4 addresses is fixed, but the number of devices, applications, and networks has exploded. Internet registries handed out almost all of the /8 and /16 blocks years ago. Today, if you want more public IPv4, you usually cannot ask a registry for fresh space; you have to buy or lease it from someone who already has it.

At the same time, our expectations for connectivity have risen. Always-on VPNs, high-availability clusters, microservices, managed databases, private SaaS environments, staging and test networks, IoT backends, and security appliances all consume addresses. Many of these workloads resist traditional NAT, or at least become harder to debug and secure when heavily NATed. The result is a classic squeeze: fixed supply, rapidly growing demand, and new use cases that prefer public, routable IPs.

If you want the broader backstory of how IPv4 ran out globally, we explained that journey step by step in our earlier article on where all the IPv4 went and why exhaustion was so quiet. Here, we will stay focused on the current price spike and what you can realistically do about it in 2025 and beyond.

Why IPv4 Address Prices Hit Record Highs

There is no single villain behind expensive IPv4. Instead, several trends have converged and pushed prices up, often faster than teams expected when they wrote their last 3–5 year capacity plan. Let us walk through the main forces we see in real projects.

1. Hard Exhaustion at the Regional Internet Registries

The foundation is simple: the global IPv4 free pool at IANA was exhausted years ago. Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) like ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC, and AFRINIC have either fully exhausted their traditional pools or moved to strict final-allocation policies. New members in some regions might receive only a tiny /24 for the lifetime of the organization, and even that requires justification and paperwork.

This means the primary pipeline of “cheap and fresh” IPv4 is gone. Almost every additional block now changes hands via intra-RIR transfers or commercial deals. When supply is locked and demand continues to rise, price becomes the main balancing mechanism.

2. Growing Demand from Hosting, SaaS, and Edge Services

On the demand side, several sectors are quietly but aggressively consuming IPv4:

• Hosting and VPS providers: Customers still often expect at least one dedicated IPv4 per VPS or dedicated server, especially if they run mail servers or legacy apps.
• SaaS platforms: Multi-tenant SaaS often segments customers by IP for security, compliance, or analytics, leading to more addresses than traditional shared hosting.
• CDNs, proxies, and security appliances: Reverse proxies, WAFs, and DDoS scrubbing nodes share IPs, but also need many anycast and regional ranges.
• Enterprise and industrial networks: Remote sites, VPN concentrators, OT networks, and partner-facing systems still prefer public addresses for simplicity.

None of these sectors existed at their current scale 10–15 years ago, but all of them are competing for the same finite IPv4 pool today.

3. New Price Anchors from the Transfer and Leasing Markets

Another driver is how IPv4 changes hands. Transfers used to be handled informally between organizations. Today, there is a mature ecosystem of brokers, legal frameworks, escrow, and RIR policies around buying and selling IPv4 space. That is a good thing for security and transparency, but it also professionalized pricing.

As more deals became public and more brokers entered the space, market participants started to benchmark against recently published transaction ranges. When an industry agrees that IPv4 is scarce and valuable, list prices tend to drift up, not down. Leasing markets created a floor as well: if you can lease addresses for a certain monthly rate, sellers are unlikely to undercut that dramatically on permanent sales.

4. Compliance, Reputation, and “Clean IP” Premiums

Not all IP addresses are equal. Addresses with a poor history of spam, abuse, or blocklisting can be significantly less useful, especially for email or API traffic to risk-sensitive partners. This has created a secondary layer of pricing:
addresses with good reputation, accurate RPKI/IRR entries, and clean abuse histories often command a premium.

We see this most clearly with customers who run their own mail infrastructure or B2B APIs. They are willing to pay more for blocks that do not start their life behind dozens of blocklists, because cleaning up a dirty range can take weeks or months. Our deeper field notes on this topic are in our guide on recovering email sender reputation and safely warming up IPs.

5. Speculation and Hoarding Behaviours

Whenever an asset has fixed supply and rising prices, some organizations start to treat it as an investment. Early recipients of very large IPv4 allocations might have more space than they practically need, but they also know it will likely be even more valuable tomorrow. The rational move is to sell slowly or lease small slices, not to flood the market. This behaviour makes sense at the individual level but reinforces the perception that IPv4 is rare and expensive, which in turn supports higher price levels.

How the IPv4 Market Works Today

If you have not been through an IPv4 deal yet, it can feel mysterious. In practice, there are two main paths: purchasing address space (a transfer) or leasing it (address rental). Each has cost, risk, and operational implications that go far beyond the sticker price.

Buying IPv4 Space

Purchasing a block means you become the registered holder at your RIR. The process typically includes:

• Justification: Demonstrating need or usage plans to the RIR, depending on policy.
• Due diligence: Verifying that the seller is the legitimate holder, checking for disputes or hijack history.
• Transfer approval: Coordinating with the RIR for paperwork and database updates.
• Operational setup: Updating route objects, RPKI ROAs, IRR records, and configuring routing on your infrastructure.

The main benefit is control: you are not dependent on a lessor’s policies, and you can use the space across different data centers and transit providers. The trade-off is capital: blocks are expensive, and you still pay recurring RIR membership or maintenance fees.

Leasing IPv4 Space

Leasing is more like renting hardware: you pay a recurring fee for the right to advertise and use a block for a defined period. This can be attractive if:

• You have a short- to medium-term need, such as a migration or product launch.
• Budget approvals for OPEX are easier than for a one-off capital purchase.
• You want to test a new geography or network design before committing.

However, there are important caveats:

• You are exposed to renewal price changes and contract terms.
• You need strong guarantees that the lessor is the legitimate holder.
• You must have a clean exit strategy in case the lease ends or policies change.

We often see teams underestimate the migration pain when a lease ends and they must renumber services. That hidden operational cost can easily exceed the savings of a short-term discount.

The Operational Overhead that Hides Behind Every /24

Whether you buy or lease, getting IPv4 is only the start. Every new block needs engineering attention:

• Routing: BGP announcements, upstream coordination, prefix-length considerations, and aggregation strategy.
• Security: Firewall rules, DDoS protection, abuse handling, and log correlation.
• Reputation: Checking for existing blocklist entries, configuring rDNS, and setting up proper abuse contacts.
• Compliance: RPKI ROAs, IRR route objects, and documentation for audits or partners.

These tasks cost engineer time. When you factor them in, the “real” cost of another /24 is not just the dollar figure in a transfer contract; it is everything needed to safely bring those addresses into production and keep them clean.

The Real Cost of “Just One More IPv4 Block”

From the outside, it is easy to see IPv4 as a simple commodity. From inside the data center, the story is very different. Let us look at how the true cost plays out for different types of organizations we work with at dchost.com.

A Small SaaS Platform Adding a New Region

Imagine a SaaS team planning to deploy their application into a second region for latency and redundancy. They estimate they need a /24 for app servers, a /25 for VPN and internal services, and several IPs for outbound mail and monitoring. On paper, that does not sound like much. In reality:

• Buying that space locks a significant amount of capital into addresses.
• Leasing means taking on migration risk when the contract ends.
• Every public endpoint increases their attack surface and monitoring scope.

If they redesign to use IPv6 for internal communication and private network links, and carefully NAT only the truly public-facing components, they might cut their IPv4 ask by half without changing their user-facing functionality.

A Growing Hosting Provider with Legacy Expectations

Traditional hosting customers often expect 1:1 mapping between servers and IPv4 addresses, especially for older control panels, custom mail setups, or licensing systems that key off IP. When a provider doubles their customer count, those expectations double IPv4 demand as well.

We see smaller providers getting squeezed here: their customers still live in an IPv4 mindset, but their upstreams are now pricing new ranges at record levels. Providers then face a difficult choice: raise prices, limit IPv4 allocations, or redesign service plans around shared IPs and IPv6.

This is also where education helps. When you explain that modern HTTPS supports SNI, that multiple domains can safely share one IP, and that IPv6 is first-class in many regions, customers are usually more flexible than it first appears.

An Enterprise Network with Mergers and Acquisitions

Enterprises that grow through acquisitions inherit many overlapping RFC1918 ranges and fragmented public space. When they try to integrate networks, they often discover that simply merging everything behind NAT creates operational chaos. Directly routable IPv4 is cleaner, but buying enough to readdress multiple business units has become extremely expensive.

Here, a thoughtful mix of technologies is needed:
careful use of private addressing, dual-stack designs, and well-planned renumbering. IPv6 is particularly powerful in this scenario because it lets you give each site a huge, globally unique block for internal traffic, while keeping scarce IPv4 for the few services that truly require it.

Practical Strategies to Live with Expensive IPv4

The good news is that you are not powerless. You might not be able to change global market prices, but you can dramatically improve how efficiently you use every address you already have. Here are practical approaches we apply in our own infrastructure and with customers at dchost.com.

1. Take IP Address Management (IPAM) Seriously

Many teams discover they do not actually know where all their IPv4 addresses are used. Before buying more space, it is worth doing a clean IPAM pass:

• Inventory all subnets and VLANs across data centers and sites.
• Identify long-abandoned test, lab, or pilot environments still holding live addresses.
• Consolidate fragmented /30s and /29s into more efficient allocations.
• Audit DHCP scopes and static assignments for stale reservations.

We have seen organizations free up entire /24s simply by retiring forgotten lab ranges and reorganizing point-to-point links to use /31 or /127 addressing where supported.

2. Use NAT and Shared IPv4 Where It Actually Makes Sense

NAT is not a silver bullet, but used thoughtfully it can extend the life of your IPv4 pool significantly. Consider:

• Shared egress IPs: Outbound-only services like software updates, telemetry, or external API calls can often share a small pool of addresses.
• Reverse proxies and load balancers: Many HTTP/S services can sit behind a small set of frontend IPs, even if they fan out to dozens of backend servers.
• NAT for internal microservices: Service-to-service traffic rarely needs its own public address; internal routing or IPv6 is usually better.

The key is to separate “needs a public IP” from “is reachable from the internet”. Those are not the same requirement. Reverse proxies, VPN gateways, and tunneling protocols give you a lot of flexibility to expose services without burning a unique IPv4 every time.

3. Make IPv6 a First-Class Citizen, Not a Side Project

IPv6 is not just a checkbox for auditors; it is your best long-term answer to IPv4 scarcity. When you move internal communication, API calls, and even user-facing traffic to IPv6 where possible, every freed IPv4 address becomes a strategic asset you can reserve for the few cases that truly require it.

If you are wondering how to get from “we know we should” to “we are confidently running dual-stack in production”, we walked through exactly that journey in our field guide on accelerating IPv6 adoption without breaking anything. The short version: start with frontends and internal admin access, use proper monitoring, and grow usage deliberately.

4. Modernize Email and Outbound Communication Strategies

Email is one of the last workloads that still pushes many teams toward 1:1 IPv4-to-server mappings. Deliverability concerns are real, but the ecosystem is slowly becoming more friendly to IPv6, especially when you correctly configure PTR, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and reputation monitoring.

If your roadmap includes serious email sending or if you plan to host your own mail servers on a VPS or dedicated machine, our detailed playbook on email deliverability over IPv6 is a good companion to this article. It shows how IPv6 can gradually take over more of the outbound load, keeping your precious IPv4 addresses focused on the most reputation-sensitive traffic.

5. Design New Projects for IPv6-First from Day One

It is much easier to avoid IPv4 dependence than to unwind it later. For new applications or greenfield deployments, consider:

• Running backends and databases on IPv6-only networks, reachable via dual-stack proxies.
• Using AAAA records and dual-stack load balancers from the first release.
• Documenting “IPv6-first” in your architecture diagrams and runbooks.
• Ensuring logs, metrics, and security tools fully understand IPv6 from day one.

We have even run complete production sites on IPv6-only VPS infrastructure, using NAT64/DNS64 to reach the remaining IPv4 web and API endpoints. If you are curious how that looks in practice, we documented the approach in our guide on hosting a website on an IPv6-only VPS using NAT64/DNS64.

Why IPv6 Is No Longer Optional in a High-Price IPv4 World

For years, IPv6 was framed as “the future of the internet”. That framing subtly encouraged teams to treat it as optional. In a world where IPv4 is cheap and plentiful, you can get away with that. In a world where IPv4 commands record-high prices, you cannot.

Here are the concrete benefits we see when customers move decisively toward IPv6:

• Cost insulation: You still need some IPv4, but every workload that runs natively on IPv6 reduces your exposure to future price spikes.
• Network simplicity: Large, flat, globally unique IPv6 ranges reduce the need for overlapping RFC1918 gymnastics in complex topologies.
• Better growth headroom: You can scale to dozens or hundreds of microservices, environments, and regions without constantly hunting for the next /24.
• Future reachability: Some mobile and residential networks already prefer IPv6; dual-stack gives them a cleaner, possibly faster path.

The trick is not to rip out IPv4 overnight. Instead, treat IPv4 as the constrained, premium resource that it is, and treat IPv6 as the default where possible. Over a few years, that mindset shift alone can make a visible difference in both costs and operational flexibility.

How We Think About IP Addresses at dchost.com

At dchost.com, we live with the same market conditions you do. Our upstreams pay more for IPv4, RIR policies keep tightening, and customers still rely on well-behaved public addresses for many workloads. The way we handle this is by combining three principles:

• IPv4 is scarce and valuable: We allocate it carefully across shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, and colocation, avoiding wasteful 1:1 mappings where they are not needed.
• IPv6 is the default where possible: New platforms and network segments are designed to be IPv6-ready from the start, so future growth does not automatically mean “buy more IPv4”.
• Clean routing and reputation: We pay close attention to routing hygiene, rDNS, and abuse handling so that the IPv4 space we do use remains trusted and useful.

When customers talk to us about new projects, we do not just ask how many IPs they want. We ask what they are building, how traffic flows, how they plan to send email, which regions matter, and what their medium-term growth looks like. Often, a slightly different design can cut IPv4 needs by a meaningful percentage without sacrificing performance or flexibility.

If you are at the stage where IPv4 costs are starting to influence project timelines or business models, bring that constraint into the architecture conversation early. It is much easier to design a dual-stack, IP-efficient platform from the start than to retrofit it after pricing has already bitten into your margins.

Planning Your Next Move in a High-Price IPv4 World

IPv4 address prices hitting record highs are not a temporary anomaly; they are the natural consequence of a finite resource meeting ever-growing demand. You cannot control the global market, but you can control how exposed your infrastructure and business model are to that market. Treat IPv4 as the expensive, limited resource it has become. Invest in better IP address management, smarter NAT and proxy patterns, and an IPv6-first mindset for all new work.

If you want to dig even deeper into the economics and strategy side, we shared more data points in our earlier piece on why IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs and what you can do about it. From there, the next step is practical: review your current allocations, identify obvious waste, and set a realistic but firm roadmap for IPv6 across your web, application, and email stacks.

As a hosting provider that lives in this reality every day, we build our shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server, and colocation services with these constraints in mind. If you are planning a new deployment or rethinking an existing one, our team at dchost.com can help you size IPv4 needs conservatively, design for IPv6 growth, and avoid surprises when the next round of price increases arrives. The sooner you align your architecture with today’s IP economics, the more room you will have to scale calmly, instead of negotiating every new /24 under pressure.