IPv4 Address Prices Soaring: What It Really Means for Your Infrastructure

IPv4 addresses have turned into a very unusual kind of asset: you cannot manufacture more of them, most of the original supply has already been handed out, and yet demand keeps growing. The result is simple but painful: IPv4 address prices are soaring. Whether you run a single VPS, manage a fleet of dedicated servers, or oversee a complex multi‑region architecture, IPv4 now shows up as a serious line item in budget reviews and capacity planning meetings. In this article, we will unpack what is really driving prices up, how the broker and transfer market works, and—most importantly—what you can do on the technical side to stay functional and cost‑efficient. We will walk through concrete scenarios we see with our own customers at dchost.com, from small agencies to SaaS platforms with thousands of containers. Our goal is straightforward: help you understand why IPv4 keeps getting more expensive and give you a practical roadmap to reduce your exposure without breaking existing services.

Why IPv4 Address Prices Are Soaring Right Now

The hard limit: 4.3 billion addresses, no more

IPv4 provides about 4.3 billion unique addresses. That sounded enormous in the 1980s, but today we have billions of smartphones, IoT devices, virtual machines, containers and microservices. Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) like RIPE NCC, ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC have already exhausted their primary IPv4 pools. New providers and growing networks can no longer request arbitrary blocks from RIRs; instead, they mostly have to buy IPv4 on the secondary market. When supply is fixed and demand keeps rising, prices climb.

From free resource to traded asset

Originally, IPv4 blocks were handed out for free or for nominal fees. Over time, organizations merged, shut down or drastically changed their business, leaving many with more addresses than they actually needed. Because RIR policies now allow transfers between organizations, those legacy addresses became tradable assets. That created a real marketplace: brokers, auctions, private sales, and standardized transfer processes. Once something becomes a tradeable scarce resource, market pricing takes over—and we are now fully living in that phase.

If you want a deeper historical story around this transition and how early allocations still shape today’s prices, you can read our article “So… Where Did All the IPv4 Go?” where we walk through the quiet years of depletion and what changed when transfers became common.

New demand drivers: AI, edge, and compliance

Recent years added extra pressure from directions that were not big factors before:

• AI and GPU clusters driving new data center builds, each needing public IPs for APIs, control planes and monitoring.
• Edge computing and CDNs deploying nodes in more regions, often requiring at least some public IPv4 footprint for compatibility.
• Regulation and security requirements that discourage large‑scale IPv4 sharing for certain workloads (e.g., audited environments, forensics, KYC/AML contexts).

All of this means: even organizations that want to be aggressive on IPv6 adoption still need enough IPv4 to bridge the real world, and they end up competing in the same tight market.

The Economics Behind the IPv4 Market

How IPv4 transfers and pricing actually work

When you see news about “IPv4 address prices hitting record highs”, it usually reflects data from brokered transfers or public auctions. Blocks are traded in sizes like /24 (256 addresses), /23, /22 and larger. Price is typically quoted per IP, but smaller blocks often cost more per address because they are easier to route and sell to smaller buyers.

Prices vary by region and by RIR policy. For example, ARIN and RIPE NCC each have their own rules about:

• Who can receive a transfer
• Justification of need and utilization
• How inter‑RIR transfers are handled

Policy tweaks can temporarily cool or heat up the market. We covered some of these changes in more detail in our article “ARIN IP Transfer Policies: What DevOps Teams Must Do Now in 2025”, which is worth a read if you manage your own ASN and IP space.

Why your hosting bill feels it even if you never buy IPs directly

Many teams never interact with IP brokers. Instead, you simply rent VPS, dedicated servers or colocation racks from a provider like dchost.com and receive a small IPv4 allocation with your service. But your provider is not immune to IPv4 prices—if we pay more to acquire and hold addresses in our upstream pools, every IPv4 only service becomes more expensive to operate.

This shows up in ways you can actually see:

• Separate monthly fees for additional IPv4 addresses
• Smaller default IPv4 allocations on new servers
• Discounts or promotions tied to IPv6‑only or dual‑stack configurations instead of IPv4‑heavy setups

Even if base server pricing looks stable, you may find that “extras” such as additional IPv4s, dedicated /29 ranges, or multiple IPs per VPS are now treated as premium options.

Speculation vs. real demand

There is often a question in technical teams: “Are IPv4 prices a bubble driven by speculators?” There is certainly some hoarding and timing behavior—organizations sitting on old blocks waiting for prices to rise further. But the underlying driver remains solid: real, structural demand from ISPs, hosting providers, enterprise networks and SaaS platforms that cannot yet shift entirely to IPv6.

As long as a significant share of the internet remains IPv4‑only, and as long as some critical partners or customers require IPv4 connectivity, that demand will persist. The market might cool or heat up in cycles, but the long‑term picture is clear: IPv4 will remain scarce and relatively expensive.

Operational Impact: What Rising IPv4 Costs Mean for Your Projects

Scenario 1: An agency juggling dozens of small sites

Imagine a digital agency hosting 80–100 client sites on a mix of shared hosting and small VPS instances. Historically, you might have used separate IPv4 addresses for:

• Each white‑label reseller hosting environment
• SSL certificates back in the early SNI‑less days
• “Reputation isolation” for clients sending marketing email

With today’s pricing, asking for 20–30 extra IPv4 addresses starts to hurt. It often makes more sense to consolidate sites onto fewer IPs, rely on SNI for HTTPS, and separate clients logically (via cPanel accounts or containers) instead of via IP address. Our article “Addon Domains vs Separate cPanel Accounts: How to Choose” dives into how to get isolation without burning through IPv4s.

Scenario 2: A SaaS platform growing faster than its IPv4 plan

Now picture a SaaS product that started with a single /24 from its provider and used one IPv4 per tenant for whitelisting and firewall rules. As the number of tenants grows, suddenly there is pressure to add more /24s, each at significantly higher cost than years ago. This affects:

• Pricing models (per‑tenant IPv4 becomes hard to justify)
• Architecture (moving from IP‑based isolation to header‑based or token‑based identification)
• Onboarding experience (educating enterprise customers about IPv6, NAT and shared IP architectures)

We see more teams redesigning internal routing and multi‑tenant architectures so they can separate tenants logically without 1:1 IPv4 mapping. Our post “Multi‑Tenant Architectures for SaaS Apps” covers patterns that reduce the need for per‑tenant public IPs.

Scenario 3: Colocation customers with legacy IPv4 habits

In colocation environments, we still encounter networks where historical design assumed “IPs are cheap”:

• Every server with multiple public IPv4s for “future use”
• Extremely sparse subnetting (e.g., /24 per small rack)
• No NAT or private address spaces for internal services

As IPv4 prices soar, re‑addressing these environments becomes financially attractive. Renumbering a rack from several /24s down to a more efficient set of subnets can free addresses for other customers and reduce recurring costs. It also pushes teams to finally adopt dual‑stack designs and leverage private addressing plus NAT where public IPs are not strictly required.

Technical Strategies to Reduce Your IPv4 Dependence

1. Audit and reclaim wasted IPv4 allocations

The most cost‑effective IPv4 is the one you already have but are not really using. Before you buy more, perform an IP utilization audit:

• List all subnets and their actual usage
• Identify servers with multiple public IPs where one would suffice
• Check historic assignments for projects that no longer exist
• Look for “reserve” or “just in case” addresses that were never put into production

Often, teams can recover 10–30% of their addresses just by cleaning up. That directly delays or avoids buying additional IPv4 space at current market prices.

2. Move internal services to private addressing

Many environments still expose internal‑only services on public IPv4 addresses because “that is how it was always done”. Typical candidates for migration to private IP space include:

• Database servers (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• Internal caches and queues (Redis, RabbitMQ, Kafka)
• Monitoring and logging clusters
• Configuration management and CI/CD nodes

With proper VPNs, private VLANs, or overlay networks (WireGuard, Tailscale, ZeroTier, etc.), these services can move to RFC1918 addresses, freeing public IPv4s. We have a detailed guide on building private overlay networks with modern tools in our article “Private Overlay Networks with Tailscale/ZeroTier”.

3. Use IPv4 NAT more strategically (without going overboard)

Network Address Translation (NAT) lets many internal systems share a small set of public IPv4 addresses. Used thoughtfully, NAT is one of the most powerful tools against rising IPv4 costs:

• Outbound‑only workloads (API clients, crawlers, update agents) can happily share IPs.
• Internal microservices only need IPv4 if they are exposed externally, not for east‑west traffic.
• Hybrid architectures can centralize NAT at a few gateways instead of giving each node its own IPv4.

However, over‑aggressive NAT can create operational pain: harder troubleshooting, complex port mappings, and issues with rate‑limited or reputation‑sensitive services. The sweet spot is to scale NAT carefully, monitor connection tables, and ensure logs retain enough information to map sessions back to internal hosts when needed.

4. Go dual‑stack wherever you can

Dual‑stack means your services are reachable over both IPv4 and IPv6. This does not eliminate IPv4 costs overnight, but it immediately reduces long‑term pressure by allowing new traffic to arrive over IPv6 when possible. Practical steps:

• Enable IPv6 on your VPS, dedicated servers or colocation uplinks.
• Publish AAAA records for your main domains and subdomains.
• Ensure your reverse proxies (Nginx, HAProxy, etc.) listen on both IPv4 and IPv6 sockets.
• Test client behavior from various networks (mobile, broadband, enterprise) to confirm IPv6 works smoothly.

If you are unsure where to begin, our article “Accelerating IPv6 Adoption” walks through a realistic migration path—from DNS changes to application‑level testing.

5. Consider IPv6‑first and IPv6‑only components

Some workloads can already live in an IPv6‑only world, even if the rest of your infrastructure is still dual‑stack. Common examples include:

• Internal microservices behind a load balancer or API gateway
• CI/CD runners, build agents, and internal dashboards
• New staging or test environments where you fully control client access

For public‑facing services, IPv6‑only is now also realistic if you combine it with NAT64/DNS64 gateways that bridge IPv6‑only backends to an IPv4‑only internet edge. We explained this pattern step‑by‑step in “The quiet aha moment that sent me down the IPv6‑only rabbit hole”, which shows how to publish sites from IPv6‑only VPSs without losing IPv4 reachability.

Planning an IPv6‑First Future Without Breaking Existing Services

Change the way you think about IP addresses in architecture design

As IPv4 becomes expensive, architecture discussions should treat public addresses as a scarce, shared resource, not a per‑VM default. Some mindset shifts we recommend in design reviews:

• “Does this service really need its own public IPv4, or just TCP connectivity?”
• “Can we terminate IPv4 once at a gateway and run the rest of the path over IPv6 or private IPv4?”
• “Is tenant or customer identity tied to IP addresses when it could be tied to certificates, tokens or headers instead?”

By decoupling identity and routing from IPs, you are free to use fewer, more expensive IPv4 addresses at the edges and cheaper, abundant IPv6 or private ranges inside.

Make IPv6 a first‑class citizen in new projects

Every new project is an opportunity to avoid tomorrow’s IPv4 cost increase. For greenfield apps and sites:

• Ensure the app fully supports IPv6 in its config, logging and security rules.
• Design firewall rules with IPv6 in mind from day one.
• Document procedures for rotating IPv6 addresses if needed.
• Confirm your third‑party integrations and SaaS partners handle IPv6 gracefully.

Doing this from the start is much easier than retrofitting IPv6 into a complex, IPv4‑assumptive codebase years later.

Update monitoring, logging and security to handle IPv6 properly

Adopting IPv6 is not just about adding AAAA records. Your observability and security stack must understand the new reality:

• Log formats should store IPv4 and IPv6 consistently.
• WAF and rate‑limit rules must account for IPv6 address ranges and not rely on IPv4‑style CIDR assumptions.
• Threat‑intelligence feeds and IP reputation lists should support IPv6 sources.

We have covered how IPv6 affects email deliverability, TLS, and security headers in various articles; if email is part of your stack, our guide “Email Deliverability over IPv6” is a practical reference to avoid surprises.

Budgeting: model IPv4 as a constrained and rising‑cost line item

From a financial planning perspective, IPv4 should move from “hidden inside server price” to a separate, explicitly modeled cost in your spreadsheets. For each project or environment, track:

• Number of public IPv4 addresses in use
• Expected growth per year
• Per‑IP cost now and a conservative assumption for future increases

When you compare architectures, include this in the TCO (total cost of ownership). Often, the IPv6‑first design wins not only on technical elegance but also on long‑term cost stability. Our article “IPv4 Address Prices Hit Record Highs” includes example projections you can adapt to your own planning models.

How dchost.com Can Help You Navigate the IPv4 Squeeze

IPv4 where you need it, not where you do not

At dchost.com, we see IPv4 price pressure from the same market forces you do, but we also see first‑hand how much waste still exists in typical deployments. Our goal is to give you just enough IPv4 where it is truly required—public‑facing endpoints, legacy integrations, reputation‑sensitive email—and encourage IPv6 or private addressing everywhere else.

Across our VPS, dedicated server and colocation services, we work with customers to:

• Right‑size IPv4 allocations and avoid unnecessary per‑server extras
• Design dual‑stack or IPv6‑first architectures for new projects
• Plan migrations from older, IP‑heavy designs to modern load‑balancer‑centric topologies

IPv6‑ready platforms for future‑proof growth

All new infrastructure we bring online is built with IPv6 in mind. That means:

• Dual‑stack connectivity on VPS and dedicated servers where supported
• IPv6‑capable network equipment and routing policies
• Ongoing internal testing of IPv6‑only and NAT64/DNS64 patterns

This approach lets you start shrinking your IPv4 dependency now instead of waiting until prices climb further. If you are currently architecting a new SaaS platform, e‑commerce cluster or high‑traffic content site, combining dual‑stack with smart caching and load‑balancing can significantly reduce your IPv4 footprint without compromising performance. Our various guides, such as “IPv4 Address Prices Soaring: What’s Really Happening and How to Respond”, walk through real‑world migration examples.

Turning IPv4 pressure into a modernization opportunity

Rising IPv4 prices are inconvenient, but they also act as a strong nudge to modernize outdated network designs, consolidate under‑utilized infrastructure, and finally treat IPv6 as a first‑class citizen. Instead of fighting the market year after year, you can use this moment to:

• Clean up unused IP allocations and simplify your topology
• Introduce dual‑stack or IPv6‑only zones in safe, controlled ways
• Align your budget planning with a realistic view of IPv4 scarcity

At dchost.com, we are happy to discuss your specific situation—whether you are running a single mission‑critical WordPress site or a fleet of multi‑tenant applications across several regions. We can help you map which parts of your stack truly need IPv4, where IPv6 can take over, and how to migrate without drama or downtime. If you are planning your next server, VPS cluster or colocation deployment, talk to us about building an IPv6‑ready, IPv4‑efficient architecture so that soaring IPv4 prices become a manageable detail, not a constant source of surprise in your infrastructure budget.