IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges Explained for Real-World Hosting

Why IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges Matter for Your Hosting Stack

IPv4 addresses used to be something you barely noticed on an invoice: a line item buried under CPU, RAM and disk. Over the last few years, that quiet detail has turned into a visible cost driver, especially if you run VPS, dedicated servers, SaaS platforms or email infrastructure. IPv4 exhaustion is no longer a theoretical problem for network operators only; it shows up as higher monthly bills, stricter IP allocation policies, and more complex architecture decisions for everyday projects.

In this article, we will unpack what is actually happening behind IPv4 exhaustion and price surges, how it affects hosting, domains and servers in practice, and what you can do to stay ahead of the curve. We will look at technical strategies (NAT, SNI, IPv6, dual-stack), cost planning, and operational tactics we use at dchost.com when designing VPS, dedicated and colocation environments for our customers. The goal is simple: help you understand where IPv4 costs are coming from and give you a realistic playbook to control them without sacrificing reliability or performance.

What Is IPv4 Exhaustion, Really?

IPv4 is the Internet Protocol version that uses 32-bit addresses, such as 203.0.113.42. A 32-bit space means roughly 4.3 billion unique addresses. When IPv4 was designed, that sounded endless. Today we know it is not.

Address space is managed in layers:

• IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) originally held the global pool of IPv4 addresses.
• RIRs (Regional Internet Registries – ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, AFRINIC, LACNIC) receive large blocks from IANA.
• Providers and organizations (like hosting companies, ISPs, enterprises) receive allocations from RIRs and sub-allocate to end users.

Exhaustion happened in stages. IANA ran out of the central free pool in 2011. Then each RIR started burning through its remaining stock, introducing increasingly strict policies and finally moving to “last /8” or “waiting list” models. If you want to dive deeper into the policy side, we previously covered how ARIN IP allocation changes reshape planning under IPv4 scarcity.

The key point: there is no longer a large, cheap, centrally-managed pool of IPv4 that providers can easily draw from. New demand must be met mostly by recycling and transferring existing space, which is exactly where the price surge comes from.

Why IPv4 Prices Are Surging Behind the Scenes

Once RIR free pools dried up, a secondary market emerged. Organizations that had more IPv4 than they needed started selling or leasing them; those who needed addresses started buying from this finite pool. Classic supply-and-demand economics took over.

Secondary Market Dynamics

Today, IPv4 blocks typically move through brokers and RIR transfer processes. Prices are influenced by:

• Block size: /24 blocks (256 IPs) are attractive for many hosting and SaaS use cases, so their price per IP is usually higher than very large or very small blocks.
• Region: Demand in North America and Western Europe is intense, which can push prices higher than in some other regions.
• Reputation and history: Blocks with a clean history (no spam blacklisting, no abuse) fetch a premium because they are safer for email and security-sensitive workloads.

Because the number of unused IPv4 addresses keeps shrinking, every new buyer competes for a smaller slice of the pie. At the same time, use cases keep multiplying: more devices, more services, more hosting customers, more SaaS platforms. The result is a steady price climb that shows no sign of reversing.

Operational and Risk Costs Baked into IPv4 Pricing

It is not just raw scarcity. Running IPv4 in 2025 also has hidden operational costs that providers must account for:

• Routing complexity: Larger routing tables and more BGP announcements increase router memory and CPU pressure, which translates into more expensive network hardware.
• Security exposure: Every public IPv4 is an attack surface. More addresses can mean more DDoS, scanning and abuse handling, which requires mitigation infrastructure and staff time.
• Reputation management: Keeping IP ranges clean (especially for email) requires active monitoring, abuse shutdowns, blocklist checks and sometimes dedicated staff.

These costs are indirectly reflected in your hosting invoices when IP prices or “additional IPv4” fees increase. When we plan networks at dchost.com, we do not just look at how many IPv4s we can technically assign; we examine the long-term security, routing and reputation burden that each expansion brings.

Quality, Geolocation and Why Not All IPv4s Are Equal

Another factor often missed in simple price discussions: two IPv4 addresses with the same prefix length can have very different value:

• Geolocation: Addresses geolocated near your customers can slightly improve latency and help with regional licensing or compliance.
• Abuse history: If a block has been heavily abused for spam or malware, it may be partially or fully blocked by email providers or firewalls.
• RIR status: Different RIRs have different transfer policies and requirements, which affects long-term planning.

Clean, well-placed IPv4 space is particularly valuable for email infrastructure, transactional messaging and some SEO-sensitive projects. That is one more reason why you see premiums in the market instead of a uniform flat price.

How IPv4 Exhaustion Impacts Hosting, VPS and Dedicated Servers

So what does all this look like for you if you run websites, SaaS applications, or client projects on VPS or dedicated servers?

Per-IP Pricing and Stricter Allocation Policies

In the past, it was common to see “included IPv4 addresses” in hosting plans almost as an afterthought. With today’s scarcity, responsible providers must treat IPv4 as a limited resource:

• Per-IP monthly fees: Additional IPv4 addresses are often priced separately, so using 5–10 public IPs on a single server has real cost.
• Justification requirements: You are increasingly asked to explain why you need extra IPs (SSL, email separation, VPN endpoints, etc.).
• Tighter limits on small plans: Shared hosting and entry-level VPS packages usually come with fewer dedicated IPv4s, pushing you towards shared-IP scenarios.

At dchost.com we see this as a chance to help customers re-think architecture rather than simply deny requests. We walk through whether features like SNI-based SSL, reverse proxies or NAT can satisfy the requirement without consuming extra IPv4s.

Shared IP Hosting and SNI for HTTPS

One of the most effective mitigations for IPv4 scarcity is shared IP hosting. Multiple domains point to the same IPv4 address, and the web server uses:

• Name-based virtual hosts for HTTP/1.1 and above.
• SNI (Server Name Indication) for HTTPS to present different SSL/TLS certificates depending on the requested hostname.

Modern browsers support SNI widely, which means you no longer need “one IPv4 per SSL certificate” as was often assumed in the early days of HTTPS. If you are planning a new site and worried about SSL costs and complexity, you can learn more about choosing between Let’s Encrypt and commercial SSL certificates; the good news is that SSL itself does not necessarily require more IPv4s anymore.

When a Dedicated IPv4 Still Makes Sense

Despite the power of SNI and shared hosting, there are still scenarios where a dedicated IPv4 per service or per domain is justified:

• Email deliverability: Separating transactional email, marketing campaigns and general hosting traffic onto different IPs can improve reputation management.
• Legacy devices or clients: Some very old clients or embedded systems do not support SNI or modern TLS; they may require a dedicated IP for SSL.
• Compliance and isolation: Certain regulated industries or multi-tenant SaaS platforms prefer or require per-tenant IP isolation for auditing or legal reasons.
• Anycast and advanced routing: Global Anycast setups or custom BGP announcements often rely on carefully managed IPv4 space.

The key is to consciously decide where a dedicated IPv4 adds real value instead of using it as a default. That mindset alone can cut your long-term IP costs significantly.

Technical Strategies to Stretch IPv4 Without Breaking Your Apps

IPv4 scarcity does not mean you must radically change every application overnight. There is a spectrum of techniques you can use to make better use of each public address.

NAT, Port Forwarding and CGNAT

NAT (Network Address Translation) lets multiple internal servers share a single public IPv4 address. On a VPS or dedicated environment, NAT can be used to:

• Expose multiple internal services (e.g. 10.0.0.10:80, 10.0.0.11:80) via different public ports or hostnames.
• Keep databases, cache servers and admin panels on private RFC1918 space, reducing the number of public IPv4s you need.

Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) extends this principle to ISPs, letting thousands of customer devices share limited IPv4 space. While CGNAT is more of an access-network technology than a hosting-side tool, it demonstrates how far IPv4 can be stretched with careful planning.

Reverse Proxies and Layer 7 Routing

Reverse proxies such as Nginx, HAProxy or application gateways play a central role in modern hosting architectures. With a single IPv4 on the edge, you can:

• Route traffic based on hostname (e.g. example.com vs api.example.com) to different back-end servers.
• Route based on path (e.g. /api/ to one service, /app/ to another) while keeping one public IP.
• Terminate TLS once, then forward traffic to private IPv4 or IPv6 back-ends.

We use this pattern extensively at dchost.com when helping customers consolidate multiple small sites or microservices behind a single entry point. It reduces IPv4 usage while preserving clear separation between applications internally.

Using DNS and HTTP Properly to Avoid IP Sprawl

Another underused tactic is smarter use of DNS and HTTP instead of creating new IPv4 allocations for every new project:

• Subdomains and subdirectories: Instead of spinning up a new IP for each microsite, host them under subdomains or subdirectories on the same server. If you are unsure which approach fits your SEO strategy, see our guide on choosing between subdomain vs subdirectory for SEO and hosting.
• Smart redirects: Use HTTP 301 redirects and canonical tags to consolidate domains to a single IP-backed site instead of hosting clones on several IPs. Our guide on pointing multiple domains to one website with 301s and canonicals walks through this in detail.

These techniques align SEO, maintainability and IPv4 savings, which is exactly the kind of win–win we like to see in infrastructure design.

IPv6: The Long-Term Answer to IPv4 Exhaustion

All the IPv4 tricks above help, but they do not change the fundamental fact: IPv4 has a hard limit, and we have hit it. IPv6 is the protocol designed to remove this ceiling, with 128-bit addresses and a practically inexhaustible space.

Why IPv6 Is No Longer Optional

A few years ago, IPv6 adoption could be treated as a “future project”. That is no longer realistic:

• Major access networks now deliver a significant portion of user traffic over IPv6.
• Modern operating systems and mobile devices are IPv6-ready by default.
• RIR policies increasingly encourage IPv6 deployment as part of allocation and renewal workflows.

If you want a broader picture, we have discussed how IPv6 adoption is accelerating and what it means for your network. The short version: ignoring IPv6 means tying your growth to the most expensive and limited resource in the stack – IPv4.

Dual-Stack: A Practical Migration Path

The realistic migration strategy is dual-stack hosting: running both IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel for a transition period that may last years. In a dual-stack setup:

• Your DNS zone has both A (IPv4) and AAAA (IPv6) records.
• Clients that support IPv6 will prefer it; others will keep using IPv4.
• You can gradually move internal components (databases, caches, APIs) to IPv6-only networks while leaving public-facing IPv4 in place.

On a VPS, enabling dual-stack is usually straightforward when the provider offers IPv6. If you want a step-by-step walkthrough, check our IPv6 setup and configuration guide for VPS servers. At dchost.com we provision IPv6-ready environments by default in regions where upstream connectivity supports it, so you do not have to retrofit later.

Business Case: Reducing Dependence on Expensive IPv4

From a cost perspective, the main benefit of IPv6 is strategic leverage. As more of your infrastructure becomes reachable and routable via IPv6:

• You can hold the line on how many IPv4s you truly need for legacy clients.
• You can consolidate multiple services behind fewer public IPv4s while using plentiful IPv6 internally.
• You are better positioned if IPv4 transfer prices continue to rise or RIR policies tighten further.

In other words, IPv6 is not just a technical upgrade; it is a hedge against a very real cost trend.

Planning Capacity and Costs Under IPv4 Scarcity

Managing IPv4 today is partly about architecture and partly about financial planning. Here is how we recommend approaching it when you design or upgrade your hosting stack.

Inventory, Reclaim and Consolidate

Start by taking a complete inventory of which IPv4s you are using and why:

• List every public IP, the services mapped to it and whether they genuinely require a dedicated address.
• Identify legacy IP assignments (old projects, unused staging environments, obsolete SSL configs) that can be retired or merged.
• Check whether multiple domains sharing similar content can be consolidated with redirects and canonical tags.

It is common to find “forgotten” allocations that can be released without any functional impact. When we perform audits for dchost.com customers with large portfolios, reclaiming even a handful of /29 or /28 allocations can meaningfully reduce recurring cost.

Right-Size Your Servers and Traffic Alongside IPs

IP planning does not exist in a vacuum. Often, customers over-allocate CPU, RAM or bandwidth while also over-allocating IPs. A combined optimization can free budget to pay fair-market rates for the IPv4s you truly need.

If you are unsure how much capacity your workloads require, our guide on estimating traffic and bandwidth needs on shared hosting and VPS is a good starting point. Once you understand real-world usage, you can choose VPS or dedicated plans that fit more closely and align your IP allocations accordingly.

Budgeting for IPv4: Thinking in Years, Not Months

Because IPv4 prices tend to move up over time, treating them as a purely monthly variable cost can be misleading. Instead:

• Model IP usage over 12–36 months, especially for SaaS and multi-tenant platforms.
• Include potential growth in tenants, regions and redundancy (e.g. failover sites needing their own IP space).
• Consider the opportunity cost of not accelerating IPv6: the more you stay IPv4-only, the more exposed you are to future price jumps.

We have written separately about why IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs and what you can do; combining that perspective with your own growth projections gives you a realistic picture of where your budget is headed.

How We Approach IPv4 and IPv6 at dchost.com

As a hosting provider, we sit in the middle of these market dynamics. We must secure enough IPv4 space to serve our customers, operate a clean and secure network, and still keep services accessible to individuals, agencies and businesses of all sizes.

In practice, that means:

• Encouraging shared IP and SNI-based SSL wherever technically and commercially sensible.
• Offering IPv6 on VPS, dedicated and colocation so customers can start building dual-stack architectures today.
• Helping customers design IP-efficient architectures with reverse proxies, private networks and careful domain strategy instead of just selling more IPs.
• Actively monitoring abuse and reputation so addresses stay clean and reliable, especially for email and e-commerce workloads.

Whether you are running a single corporate website, a portfolio of client sites or a growing SaaS platform, we can help you strike the right balance between cost, flexibility and future-proofing in your IP strategy.

Wrapping Up: Adapting Calmly to IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges

IPv4 exhaustion and price surges are not temporary anomalies; they are the result of a predictable, long-running trend finally reaching everyday hosting. The good news is that you do not have to react with panic or overpay for resources you do not truly need. With a clear view of your IP inventory, smarter use of shared hosting techniques, and a realistic dual-stack roadmap, you can keep your infrastructure both sustainable and scalable.

From our perspective at dchost.com, the winning strategy is simple: treat IPv4 as a scarce, strategic resource and treat IPv6 as the default for new growth. Use reverse proxies, NAT and SNI to stretch existing IPv4 allocations, and plan your DNS, SSL and domain architecture with consolidation in mind. If you are unsure where to start or want a second pair of eyes on your current setup, our team can help you map out a practical IP and hosting plan that fits your projects and budget today, while keeping you ready for the next decade of Internet growth.