IPv4 Address Prices Hit Record Highs: What It Means For Your Hosting

IPv4 address prices are no longer just a line item in a network budget; they have become a strategic constraint for anyone running websites, SaaS platforms, or hosting infrastructure. As a hosting provider managing shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and colocation at scale, we see the impact directly: every extra public IPv4 address now has a noticeable cost, and careless allocation shows up quickly in the monthly numbers. In this article, we will break down why IPv4 address prices have hit record highs, how this filters through to your hosting costs, and what you can practically do on the technical and architectural side to stay flexible without wasting budget. The goal is simple: treat IPv4 as a scarce asset, design around that reality, and use IPv6 and smarter network architecture to keep your infrastructure future-ready.

IPv4 At Record Highs: What Is Actually Going On?

First, some context. IPv4 is the classic internet addressing system with 32-bit addresses like 203.0.113.15. That 32-bit space means roughly 4.3 billion possible addresses. It sounded huge in the 1980s; it is painfully small today.

Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) such as RIPE NCC, ARIN, APNIC and others have effectively run out of fresh IPv4 space for normal allocations. That does not mean IPv4 has disappeared, but it does mean that almost every new address today comes from the transfer market rather than from a registry’s free pool.

On this secondary market, companies that own unused IPv4 blocks can sell or lease them to others. As more organisations fight over a fixed supply, prices per IP keep climbing. Over the last years, prices have steadily pushed upward, and in many regions we are now at levels that would have sounded unrealistic a decade ago. That is what we mean by IPv4 prices hitting record highs: the cost per address on the open market is higher than it has ever been, and there is no sign of a return to the old days.

If you want a deeper, market-focused overview, we have already analysed the economics in our article why IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs and how that could eventually stabilise. Here, we will stay closer to the hosting and architecture side: how this affects real infrastructures and what to change in your design.

Why IPv4 Address Prices Keep Climbing

1. Hard Limit On Supply

The most important fact is also the simplest: the IPv4 space is finite and fully allocated. There is no way to mint new IPv4 blocks.

• 32-bit limit: IPv4 allows 4,294,967,296 unique addresses in theory. A big part is reserved and not routable on the public internet.
• RIR exhaustion: Each RIR has already handed out its available IPv4 blocks. New requests mostly receive tiny last-resort allocations or nothing at all.
• Secondary market only: New demand is now served by transfers between organisations, often via brokers, with real money attached to every single IP.

In other words, the supply curve is nearly vertical. Even if demand stayed flat, prices would be under pressure. But demand is not flat.

2. Demand For Public IPs Is Still Growing

Despite IPv6 adoption progress, enterprises and service providers still rely heavily on IPv4 for public-facing services. Several trends keep demand strong:

• SaaS and multi-tenant platforms: Many platforms still prefer dedicated IPv4s per tenant, per environment, or per region for routing, firewalling and compliance.
• Security and segmentation: Separate IPv4 addresses are used to isolate services (for example mail vs web), simplify firewall rules, or segregate customer traffic.
• ISP and VPN growth: Broadband providers, mobile operators and VPN services all need large IPv4 pools for subscribers, especially where legacy devices lack IPv6.
• Email deliverability: Some organisations keep multiple outbound IPv4s to separate transactional, marketing and high-volume email, and to recover from reputation issues.

Every new cluster, every additional region, and every extra product line can easily demand another set of addresses. When you multiply that across thousands of networks worldwide, steady demand plus fixed supply equals price pressure.

3. Policy, Compliance And Brokerage Costs

The sticker price per IPv4 is not the only cost. Transfers also carry transaction friction:

• RIR policies: ARIN, RIPE NCC and others impose documentation, justification and transfer processes that take time and administrative effort.
• Broker and legal fees: Large blocks are typically acquired through brokers, with contractual work, escrow and due diligence.
• Registry fees: RIRs charge annual membership or resource fees, which add ongoing overhead to holding significant IPv4 space.

All of this gets baked into the effective per-IP cost, especially for smaller buyers who cannot negotiate at massive scale.

4. Reputation, Abuse And Risk Premiums

Not all IPv4 addresses are equal. A clean, well-maintained block with good email reputation is far more valuable than a block that has spent years on spam lists and blocklists.

• Cleaning up abused ranges takes time: delisting, monitoring, and gradual warm-up.
• Some blocks come with historical baggage that never fully disappears.
• Providers who actively maintain reputation add that cost into pricing.

This creates a kind of reputation premium: well-managed IPv4 space that has been kept clean is scarce and commands higher recurring value. For hosting providers, this is not theoretical; we continuously invest effort into protecting IP reputation so our customers can send mail and run services reliably.

How Record IPv4 Prices Hit Your Hosting Budget

So how does all this show up on your invoice if you are running websites, apps or infrastructure?

Shared Hosting: Fewer Dedicated IPs, More Sharing

On shared hosting, dozens or hundreds of websites share a single IPv4 address. Thanks to SNI (Server Name Indication), even HTTPS sites can coexist on one IP without any problem. The impact of higher IPv4 prices here is relatively small per site, but it does change the defaults:

• Dedicated IPv4 addresses for individual shared-hosting sites become rarer and more expensive add-ons.
• Bulk resellers are encouraged to keep using shared IP pools where possible.

We have covered the technical foundations of this in detail in our article on hosting multiple HTTPS websites on one IP with SNI. The short version: modern browsers do not require a separate IPv4 per TLS certificate anymore, so shared IPs are the sane baseline.

VPS And Dedicated Servers: IP Count Starts To Matter

On VPS and dedicated servers, each machine needs at least one public IPv4; some setups historically consumed several:

• Separate IP for each SSL certificate (legacy practice).
• Distinct IPs for staging vs production.
• Multiple IPs for outbound mail segmentation, monitoring, VPNs, and so on.

As prices climb, every extra IPv4 allocation must be justified. At dchost.com, we increasingly focus customers on a small, well-utilised set of IPv4s, while pushing more internal and east-west traffic to private ranges and IPv6. The net effect for you:

• Base plans typically include one or a small number of IPv4s.
• Additional IPs are available, but you will feel their cost more explicitly.
• Careless IP sprawl (for example, a dedicated IP for every test subdomain) becomes expensive.

Email Deliverability: IP Rotation Is No Longer Cheap

In the past, some teams handled email reputation issues by simply switching to new IPv4s. With record-high IP prices, this is no longer a scalable or responsible strategy.

• You are less likely to receive large pools of fresh IPv4s just for experimentation.
• It becomes more important to manage SPF, DKIM and DMARC properly, keep complaint rates low and protect existing reputation.

Instead of treating IPs as disposable, you now treat them as assets worth protecting. Our related guide on SPF, DKIM and DMARC for cPanel and VPS email infrastructures shows how to build a more sustainable email setup around the IPs you already have.

Colocation And Bring-Your-Own-IP Scenarios

For customers using colocation, a separate decision arises: do you rely on the data centre or hosting provider’s IP space, or do you bring your own IPv4 blocks from a registry allocation or a long-term lease?

• Owning your own block gives you flexibility and long-term control, but it requires upfront capital and RIR membership.
• Leasing or using provider-assigned IPs reduces your administrative overhead, but you are exposed to market repricing.

Either way, the days of treating IPv4 as a trivial part of colocation design are over. When we help customers plan colocation at dchost.com, IP strategy is now one of the first topics on the table, alongside power, cooling and rack layout.

Technical Strategies To Use Fewer IPv4s Without Losing Flexibility

If IPv4 is expensive, the natural response is to use it more efficiently. That does not mean limiting your growth; it means designing your stack so that each public IP provides maximum value.

1. Consolidate web hosting With SNI And Reverse Proxies

Technically, the easiest win is to stop thinking in terms of one IPv4 per website. With SNI and modern TLS:

• You can host hundreds of HTTPS sites on a single IPv4 address.
• Web servers like Nginx, Apache and LiteSpeed can route based on the hostname in the TLS handshake and HTTP Host header.
• Reverse proxies and load balancers can front many internal services behind the same IP.

A typical pattern we use for customers is:

• Expose a small set of IPv4 addresses for public entry points (web, API, mail).
• Terminate TLS and routing at those edges.
• Forward traffic internally over private IPv4 ranges (RFC1918) or IPv6.

This way, your public IPv4 consumption stays flat even as you add more domains, microservices or tenants internally.

2. Aggressive Use Of Private Addressing And NAT

Private IPv4 ranges (such as 10.0.0.0/8 or 192.168.0.0/16) are free and unlimited inside your own network. By default, every internal VM, container or database should sit behind Network Address Translation (NAT) rather than consuming a public IPv4.

• Application servers access the internet via shared NAT gateways.
• Internal services communicate over RFC1918 space or IPv6, never touching public IPv4.
• Only edge components that actually need to be reachable from outside have public addresses.

For many customers migrating from older environments, this alone can cut public IPv4 usage by 50–70 percent without any visible change to end users.

3. Design Logging And Security With Shared IPs In Mind

One common worry about sharing IPv4 addresses is traceability: if multiple sites or tenants share a single IP, can you still investigate incidents, separate logs and respond to abuse?

The answer is yes, with proper logging and IDs:

• Log hostnames, virtual host identifiers and application-level user IDs alongside IPs.
• Store timestamped reverse-proxy logs indicating which upstream handled which request.
• For email, keep message IDs, envelope sender/recipient information and queue logs.

This also intersects with privacy regulations. If you are archiving request logs that include IP addresses, you should consider pseudonymisation and retention policies. Our guide on log anonymisation and IP masking techniques for GDPR-compliant hosting logs covers practical approaches to keep auditability without over-storing personal data.

4. Rethink When You Truly Need A Dedicated IP

There are still valid reasons to request dedicated IPv4 addresses, for example:

• Running your own mail server where reputation is fully under your control.
• Hosting a white-label reseller platform where each agency wants their own IP and reverse DNS branding.
• Special compliance or firewall rules that apply at the IP level.

The key is to make these exceptions intentional and documented instead of the default. At dchost.com, we often sit down with customers, look at their existing IP usage, and distinguish between:

• Must-have dedicated IPs (for example, a primary outbound mail IP).
• Nice-to-have IPs that might be consolidated using SNI, NAT or proxies.
• Legacy allocations that no longer serve a clear purpose.

With prices at record highs, this kind of housekeeping directly saves money.

Leaning Into IPv6 While IPv4 Is Expensive

If IPv4 is scarce and costly, IPv6 is the opposite: a 128-bit address space so large that exhaustion is effectively impossible on human timescales. While IPv6 will not immediately remove your need for public IPv4s, it can dramatically reduce the pressure.

1. Dual-Stack As The New Baseline

A realistic target for most infrastructures today is dual-stack hosting:

• Every public-facing service is reachable via both IPv4 and IPv6.
• Clients that support IPv6 will use it preferentially.
• Clients that only support IPv4 continue working as before.

In practice, this means:

• Adding AAAA records in DNS alongside existing A records.
• Configuring web servers, load balancers and firewalls to listen on IPv6.
• Ensuring your monitoring and logging understand IPv6 addresses.

We have detailed, step-by-step guidance on this in our article IPv6 setup and configuration for your VPS server, which walks through enabling IPv6 on real hosting stacks.

2. IPv6-First Internal Architectures

Even if some of your users are still IPv4-only, your internal network does not need to be. For example:

• Run internal APIs, databases and caches over IPv6-only subnets.
• Use IPv6 addresses within Kubernetes clusters and container networks.
• Let your configuration management and service discovery store IPv6 first.

Edge devices can bridge between IPv4 and IPv6 as needed (for example via reverse proxies, load balancers or NAT64 where applicable). The main benefit is long-term: as more of your traffic shifts to IPv6, the number of IPv4 addresses you need to expose to the public internet shrinks and stabilises.

We have examined this transition more strategically in our guide on how accelerating IPv6 adoption should influence your network strategy. The message is consistent: the earlier you get comfortable with IPv6 in your stack, the easier it is to keep IPv4 usage under control while prices remain high.

3. IPv6-Only Services With IPv4 Fronts

In some advanced architectures, you can run internal services as IPv6-only and use IPv4 only at the very edge.

• Public load balancers or proxies have both IPv4 and IPv6.
• They forward requests to IPv6-only application servers.
• Outbound requests from apps to the internet are translated via NAT64 or proxies.

This pattern is particularly attractive for new greenfield services where you do not have legacy IPv4-only dependencies. It lets you treat IPv4 addresses like scarce front doors instead of something every component expects to own.

Practical Planning: What We Recommend To dchost.com Customers

Given all of this, what should you actually change in your planning over the next 6–24 months? Here is how we typically guide different types of customers.

1. Small Businesses And Standard Websites

If you are running a corporate site, blog or basic e-commerce store without heavy custom infrastructure:

• Use shared hosting or a single VPS with one public IPv4 address.
• Host multiple domains on that IP using SNI and virtual hosts.
• Enable IPv6 for the site early, so future traffic can shift smoothly.
• Request a dedicated IP only if you truly need it for mail or compliance.

For this level, record IPv4 prices mostly matter indirectly: they influence how hosting packages are structured, but they should not block your project.

2. Agencies And Freelancers Hosting Dozens Of Sites

Agencies that host tens or hundreds of sites for clients feel IPv4 pricing more directly. Our recommendations here:

• Consolidate as many sites as possible on shared IPv4s using SNI.
• Reserve dedicated IPv4s for specific use cases such as separate outbound mail or client-branded reverse DNS where the client is paying for it.
• Document which site or customer is using which IP; treat IPs as assets to be re-assigned when projects end.
• Build new projects IPv6-ready from day one.

If you are planning a multi-tenant architecture for clients, our guide on white-label hosting architecture for agencies can help you combine reseller, VPS and billing layers in a way that uses IP addresses efficiently.

3. SaaS Platforms And High-Growth Projects

For SaaS teams, IP strategy is now part of your business model, not just a network detail. What we recommend:

• Budget explicitly for IPv4 as a separate cost line, not just “network”.
• Model growth: how many tenants, regions or nodes will actually require distinct IPv4s?
• Standardise patterns: for example, one IPv4 per region per environment, instead of ad-hoc assignments.
• Build IPv6-first for internal microservices and databases to avoid future IP scarcity inside your own stack.

If you plan to send large volumes of email from your SaaS, design a deliverability architecture around a small, high-quality pool of IPv4s, not constant churn. Our various IPv4 exhaustion articles such as this real-world guide to IPv4 exhaustion and price surges are good companions when you are drafting capacity and budget projections.

4. Enterprises, ISPs And Colocation Customers

Larger organisations and colocation customers often have complex legacy allocations and on-premises networks. For them, record IPv4 prices should trigger a structured review:

• Perform an IP inventory: what ranges do you own, where are they announced, who uses them?
• Identify under-utilised segments that could be consolidated.
• Segment your address space into internal-only vs publicly routed ranges and aggressively move internal systems off public IPv4 where possible.
• Decide whether to bring your own IPs to colocation or use provider space, based on your growth horizon and compliance constraints.

We frequently work with such teams to redesign their hosting and IP strategy, combining dedicated servers, colocation and VPS with a clear plan for IPv4 and IPv6 usage. If you are at this stage, think in three-to-five-year windows rather than just the next quarter; that is the timescale at which IPv4 pricing and IPv6 adoption curves really matter.

Conclusion: Treat IPv4 As A Scarce Asset, Not A Commodity

IPv4 address prices hitting record highs is not a temporary glitch; it is a structural outcome of a finite resource meeting ongoing demand. For anyone building or running online services, the implications are clear. You cannot assume cheap, unlimited IPv4 space anymore. Instead, you treat every public IPv4 as something that must earn its keep: shared where possible, dedicated only when there is a clear technical or business reason.

The good news is that the tools to adapt already exist. With SNI, reverse proxies, private addressing and dual-stack architectures, you can host many websites and services on a small, stable pool of IPv4s. With IPv6, you can remove internal scaling limits entirely and prepare your infrastructure for the next decade. Along the way, you improve logging, security and privacy practices, because you can no longer afford sloppy IP usage.

At dchost.com, we design our shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server and colocation offerings with exactly this reality in mind. If you are unsure how many IPv4 addresses you truly need, or how to start your IPv6 journey without breaking existing sites, reach out to our team. We are happy to review your current setup, propose a realistic IP plan, and help you keep your infrastructure flexible and future-ready even as IPv4 prices keep climbing.