IPv4 Address Prices Soaring: What’s Really Driving the Surge?

IPv4 address prices are no longer a minor line in the budget. For many teams, they have become a material cost that directly shapes hosting architecture, email infrastructure and even product roadmaps. If you are planning new services, scaling a SaaS platform or simply trying to keep hosting bills under control, the question “Why are IPv4 addresses so expensive now?” appears in almost every cost analysis. In this article, we will unpack why IPv4 address prices are soaring, how the global transfer market actually works, and what this means for your hosting and network strategy in the next 3–5 years. We will also walk through practical, low-drama ways to control IPv4 spend: reclaiming unused space, smart NAT design, dual-stack deployment and a realistic path toward IPv6 that does not break your existing stack. As the dchost.com team, we’ll keep the focus on what you can do right now with your hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and colocation footprint.

Why IPv4 Address Prices Are Soaring Right Now

To understand why IPv4 address prices are soaring, you have to start with a simple fact: the free pool of IPv4 is gone. Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) like RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, AFRINIC and LACNIC have all either fully exhausted or severely limited their remaining IPv4 supply. New organizations can no longer receive large, cheap blocks directly from an RIR the way they could a decade ago.

Once RIRs stopped handing out big allocations, a secondary market emerged. Organizations that received /16, /17 or even larger blocks in the 1990s and early 2000s now lease or sell those addresses. That market behaves more like real estate than a utility: prices respond to demand, speculation and regulation. Over the last few years, several forces have pushed demand sharply upward:

• Explosive growth in online services: Streaming, gaming, SaaS and e-commerce all need globally reachable addresses, especially for load balancers, APIs and email-sending infrastructure.
• AI and data center expansion: Modern data center growth is intense. As more physical servers go online, providers need more routable IPv4, even for workloads that are mostly internal.
• Email deliverability pressure: Businesses want separate IPs for different mail streams (marketing, transactional, corporate) to protect sender reputation.
• IPv6 adoption lagging in some stacks: Even though IPv6 is growing, many legacy applications, partner integrations and hardware still assume IPv4.

Put simply, the supply is fixed while demand keeps rising. That imbalance is why IPv4 prices have climbed from a few dollars per address to many times that in just a few years. If you want a deeper historical narrative, we already explored the long-term dynamics in our article on why IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs and what you can do about it. Here we’ll focus more on what the current price surge means for everyday hosting decisions.

How the IPv4 Market Really Works (And Why It Feels So Illogical)

From the outside, IPv4 pricing can seem arbitrary. Two providers may quote completely different rates for what looks like the same /24. The reality is that IPv4 is not a single global marketplace, but a patchwork of regional rules, contracts and risk assessments.

RIR policies, transfers and scarcity by region

Every allocation and transfer must respect the policies of the relevant RIR. That means:

• Justification of need: Some RIRs still require detailed justification before they approve a transfer, especially for large blocks.
• Waiting periods and paperwork: Administrative overhead and audit requirements make transfers slower and more costly.
• Cross-region complexity: Moving space between regions (for example, ARIN to RIPE) often involves extra scrutiny and higher broker fees.

As RIRs tighten requirements, “clean” space that passes compliance checks quickly becomes more valuable. For a deeper dive into these policy shifts, especially in North America, you can read our analysis on ARIN IP transfer policies and what DevOps teams must do in 2025.

Buying vs leasing IPv4 blocks

Organizations typically choose between buying blocks outright and leasing them:

• Buying: Large upfront capital expense, but more control. You can announce the space from your own ASN and move it between data centers or providers. However, you bear the risk of policy changes and reputation issues.
• Leasing: Treated as an operational expense. Lower initial cost, but recurring fees that can increase when contracts renew. You are also more exposed if the lessor withdraws the space or changes terms.

Rising prices hit both models. When market rates jump, new leases are more expensive and existing leases may be repriced at renewal. Purchase prices climb as well, and buyers worry about locking in at the top of the market.

Why the “cheap” deals often backfire

In an environment where IPv4 prices are soaring, it is tempting to chase the cheapest possible offer. Unfortunately, that approach often leads to trouble:

• Blacklisted space: Some cheap blocks come with a history of spam or abuse. Cleaning reputation can take months and sometimes never fully recovers.
• Unclear ownership: Poorly documented chains of custody can create disputes with RIRs or other parties claiming rights to the block.
• Route hijack and stability risks: If space is not managed cleanly in RPKI and route registries, you can run into routing conflicts or hijack attempts.

Quality IPv4 space that is clean, well-documented and stable inevitably commands higher prices. When you see a “bargain” price that is far below market, it usually reflects hidden risks that will cost you more in engineering time, deliverability issues and downtime.

Real-World Impact on Hosting, SaaS and Enterprise Networks

When IPv4 address prices soar, the impact is not limited to network teams. It shows up in hosting product design, pricing for end customers and even which features you can afford to ship. Let’s look at a few concrete scenarios we see regularly as a hosting provider.

Shared hosting and small business websites

On classic shared hosting, hundreds of domains can share a single IPv4 address thanks to HTTP host headers and SNI for TLS. As IPv4 gets more expensive, it becomes even more important to use these mechanisms efficiently. Giving every small brochure site its own dedicated IPv4 is simply not sustainable anymore.

Instead, we reserve dedicated IPv4 for use cases that really need it: specialized SSL setups, legacy clients without SNI support, or applications where isolation and custom firewall rules justify the cost. For the vast majority of typical business sites, well-configured shared IPs work perfectly and keep costs under control.

VPS and dedicated servers

For VPS and dedicated server users, IPv4 pricing affects how many addresses are bundled with each plan and how much additional IPs cost. Ten years ago, it was common to see multiple IPv4 addresses included by default. Today, we design plans around tighter allocations and encourage customers to justify each additional IP with a real technical requirement:

• One IPv4 for the main web stack (HTTP/HTTPS, API endpoints, admin panels).
• Additional IPv4 only when you need separate routing, email reputation isolation or non-standard protocols.
• IPv6 as the default for internal service-to-service communication.

If you are rethinking your server footprint in response to rising network costs, you may find our detailed guide to cutting hosting costs by right-sizing your VPS, bandwidth and storage useful as a complementary checklist.

SaaS platforms and multi-tenant architectures

SaaS platforms and multi-tenant applications are particularly exposed to IPv4 inflation. Each new cluster of customers or region often requires public IPv4 for:

• Public APIs and web frontends.
• Callback endpoints (webhooks) used by partners.
• Dedicated email IPs for high-volume tenants.

When address prices rise, suddenly the cost model of “one public IP per big tenant” stops making sense. We regularly work with SaaS teams to redesign their architecture so multiple tenants can share IPv4 endpoints while still maintaining isolation and security at the application and network layers.

If you are running a multi-tenant SaaS, our article on multi-tenant architectures and choosing the right hosting infrastructure pairs nicely with this IPv4 discussion.

Email infrastructure and reputation management

Email is one of the biggest drivers of IPv4 demand. Many organizations want separate IPv4 addresses for:

• Transactional emails (password resets, invoices, critical notifications).
• Marketing and newsletter campaigns.
• Internal/corporate mail.

Segregating these streams helps protect critical transactional mail from any deliverability issues caused by marketing campaigns. But each isolated stream consumes at least one IPv4 address. As prices soar, you must be much more deliberate about how many IPs you dedicate to email and how you warm them up, monitor reputation and avoid blocklists.

Cost-Control Strategies While IPv4 Prices Keep Climbing

The good news: rising IPv4 prices do not mean you are trapped. There are technical and operational strategies that meaningfully reduce your dependency on large public IPv4 pools, without sacrificing availability or performance.

Reclaim and clean up unused IPv4 space

Before buying or leasing additional IPv4, audit the space you already have:

• Inventory all assignments: Keep a central IP address management (IPAM) source of truth with allocations, DNS records and contact owners.
• Identify idle resources: Decommissioned servers, abandoned test environments and forgotten VPN IPs add up.
• Standardize subnetting: Collapse fragmented allocations into cleaner subnets so you can free up contiguous blocks.

This type of housekeeping can often reclaim 10–20% of your space, which significantly defers new purchases.

Use NAT and private address space intelligently

Not every workload needs its own public IPv4. With well-designed NAT (Network Address Translation), you can:

• Place application servers, caches and databases on private RFC1918 addresses.
• Expose only load balancers and edge gateways to the public Internet.
• Use separate NAT pools for outbound-only traffic to keep logs and troubleshooting manageable.

The key is to avoid overly complex NAT chains that make debugging impossible. Start simple: one or two well-documented NAT gateways per environment (production, staging, development) and clear logging of translations.

Consolidate public endpoints without sacrificing flexibility

With modern reverse proxies and application gateways, a single IPv4 address can front dozens or hundreds of applications. Techniques that help here include:

• HTTP host headers and SNI: Serve many HTTPS sites from one IP using virtual hosts and TLS SNI.
• Path-based and header-based routing: Direct /api, /admin or specific hostnames to different backends.
• Port mapping only when it makes sense: For internal or technical users, non-standard ports can be acceptable; for public consumer apps, prefer clean 80/443.

This consolidation is especially powerful on VPS and dedicated servers, where dchost.com customers frequently run multiple projects behind a single well-tuned reverse proxy.

Be intentional about “one IP per feature” habits

Many organizations ended up with a “one IP per service” pattern simply because IPv4 was cheap at the time. Examples:

• Separate IP for the marketing site, app domain and admin panel, even though they live on the same server.
• Multiple email IPs that are barely used or not warmed up properly.
• Dev and staging environments with public IPv4 that could easily sit behind VPN or IPv6-only access.

As prices soar, it’s worth challenging these defaults. Where public IPv4 is not essential, migrate to private addressing, IPv6-only access for internal users, or access via VPN and bastion hosts.

Lean Hard Into IPv6 (Without Breaking Your Stack)

Every serious long-term strategy for dealing with IPv4 price inflation includes one core move: shifting as much traffic as possible to IPv6. IPv6 does not magically make IPv4 free again, but it does reduce how many IPv4 addresses you need to run your infrastructure.

Why IPv6 reduces long-term pressure

When you deploy dual-stack (IPv4 + IPv6):

• Users and services that support IPv6 connect over IPv6, leaving IPv4 capacity for legacy clients.
• Internal microservices, databases and message queues can communicate over IPv6-only networks.
• Future scaling (new services, regions, tenants) relies primarily on IPv6, so additional IPv4 requirements grow much more slowly.

This is exactly why we invest heavily in IPv6 support at dchost.com across hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and colocation. Our goal is simple: help you grow without buying a new block of IPv4 every time your traffic doubles.

Start with low-risk IPv6 wins

If your organization is still early in its IPv6 journey, you don’t need to flip a big switch overnight. Instead, start with steps that deliver quick wins with low risk:

• Enable IPv6 on front-end web servers and CDNs while keeping IPv4 as a fallback.
• Use IPv6 for internal traffic between services on the same VPS or within the same data center.
• Roll out IPv6 support gradually by region, feature flag or customer segment.

We’ve covered the operational side of this in multiple guides, such as our article on how to accelerate IPv6 adoption without leaving your network behind and our step-by-step IPv6 setup and configuration guide for your VPS server.

Handle the tricky bits: email, legacy apps and monitoring

Some parts of your stack need extra care when moving toward IPv6:

• Email: Many providers support IPv6 for SMTP, but you must configure PTR, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and reputational monitoring carefully.
• Legacy applications: Older software may assume IPv4 literals or fail on IPv6-only environments. Dual-stack is usually the safest migration path.
• Monitoring and logging: Ensure your observability stack can store, query and visualize IPv6 addresses without truncation or formatting issues.

None of these are show-stoppers; they simply require planning. Our own deployments at dchost.com are heavily dual-stack, and we’ve found that once the basic patterns are in place, IPv6 becomes just another part of the standard playbook.

How dchost.com Helps You Navigate the New IPv4 Reality

As IPv4 address prices soar, the most important thing is to stop treating IPv4 as an afterthought in your hosting decisions. IP strategy now belongs right next to CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth in your architecture discussions. That is exactly how we approach things at dchost.com.

When you host with us – whether on shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers or colocation – we look at your IPv4 and IPv6 usage as part of the overall design:

• Right-sized IPv4 allocations: We help you avoid over-provisioning IPv4 while still covering real technical needs like email segregation, SSL edge nodes and multi-region failover.
• IPv6-first architectures: Our infrastructure is built to make dual-stack deployment straightforward, so new services can lean on IPv6 from day one.
• Efficient consolidation: We design reverse proxy and load-balancing layers so multiple applications can share IPv4 endpoints without performance penalties.
• Transparent planning: If your roadmap includes big campaigns or regional expansions, we work with you early to forecast IP needs instead of reacting at the last minute when prices spike.

If you want to dive deeper into the broader context, we recommend reading our explainer on IPv4 exhaustion and price surges with realistic adaptation strategies. Think of this current article as the practical, day-to-day companion: what to change in your hosting and network design this quarter so soaring IPv4 prices don’t derail your plans.

In the end, IPv4 scarcity is here to stay. Prices may fluctuate, but the long-term trend is clear. The organizations that will feel the least pain are those that treat IPv4 as a constrained resource, make smart use of NAT and consolidation, and aggressively enable IPv6 wherever possible. At dchost.com, we are ready to help you take that path: from selecting the right hosting plan and IP layout to designing dual-stack architectures that scale without burning your budget on IPv4 alone.