IPv4 Address Prices Soaring: What’s Really Happening and How to Respond

IPv4 address prices are no longer a niche concern for network engineers; they are a line item that can reshape your entire hosting and infrastructure budget. Whether you manage a growing SaaS platform, run multiple e‑commerce sites, or operate as an agency with dozens of client servers, the cost of a simple IPv4 address has probably surprised you in the last year. Blocks that once felt almost free are now traded like digital real estate, with per‑IP prices that keep creeping up every quarter. In our hosting and data center planning at dchost.com, we see the impact of this every day: capacity sizing meetings include IP availability; new product launches require IP conservation strategies; even colocation customers ask how to stretch the IPs they already have. In this article, we will walk through why IPv4 address prices are soaring, how the market actually works, what this means for your hosting plans, and concrete steps you can take right now to stay in control.

Why IPv4 Address Prices Are Soaring Right Now

To understand today’s pricing, you need to start with a simple fact: IPv4 is a finished product line. There are exactly 4.3 billion usable IPv4 addresses in the global pool, and the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) have essentially handed out everything they can. That means any IPv4 address you use today is either recycled, transferred, or carved out of tiny last‑chance allocations.

Global exhaustion finally became real

For years, people talked about “IPv4 exhaustion” as a future problem. That future is now the present. RIPE, ARIN, APNIC and other RIRs have either run out of general‑use IPv4 or are restricted to very small special‑case allocations. New networks that want more IPv4 space can no longer simply request it; they have to buy or lease from someone who already holds it.

We covered the macro picture in more depth in our article on IPv4 exhaustion and price surges and how to prepare your network, but the short version is: exhaustion turned IPv4 into an asset market, not an allocation process.

Data center and AI demand is intensifying the squeeze

Just as the free pool ran out, demand for hosting capacity exploded. New data halls are being built worldwide, driven by cloud services, SaaS, streaming, and more recently, AI workloads. Every new rack of servers needs at least some IPv4 connectivity: for management planes, customer‑facing services, or legacy integrations that still can’t speak IPv6.

The result is a bidding war, especially for clean, routable, and reputation‑safe address blocks. As we discussed in our piece on how AI demand is reshaping data center expansion plans, infrastructure is scaling faster than the available IPv4 pool can reasonably support.

IPv4 has become a financial asset

Because there is a fixed supply and high demand, IPv4 now behaves like an investment asset. Organizations that received generous /16 or /8 allocations years ago are discovering they can sell or lease part of that space at attractive prices. Brokers and marketplaces help match buyers and sellers, and each successful high‑priced transfer becomes a new reference point that pushes the average price up.

As a hosting provider, we feel this directly: acquiring fresh IPv4 space through transfers is significantly more expensive than it was just a couple of years ago, and these costs ultimately influence the price of dedicated servers, VPS plans, and additional IP add‑ons.

Policy and compliance add friction (and cost)

RIR transfer policies are also evolving. There are stricter requirements for documenting ownership, demonstrating need, and preventing fraud or hijacking. These changes are good for security, but they introduce delays and administrative overhead, which translates into higher transaction costs.

If you want to dig deeper into this angle, our article on ARIN IP transfer policy changes and what DevOps teams must do in 2025 explains how policy evolution feeds back into pricing and planning.

How the IPv4 Market Works (and Why It Feels Like Real Estate)

From the outside, IPv4 pricing can look chaotic: different numbers from different providers, widely varying buy vs. lease costs, and mysterious surcharges for “clean” IPs. Underneath, though, the logic is similar to commercial real estate.

Address blocks vs. single IPs

RIRs and large holders trade in blocks: /24, /22, /20 and larger. Brokers quote prices per IP, but most deals involve whole blocks with routing history and documented ownership. Smaller hosting customers see this filtered down into:

• A single IPv4 address included with a VPS or dedicated server
• Optional additional IPs, sold or rented individually or in small groups
• Special blocks (for example, for mail servers or SSL offload) at a premium

Just like renting one office in a building costs more per square meter than leasing the whole floor, the per‑IP cost you see as a retail customer will always be higher than the wholesale transfer price for a large block.

Clean reputation vs. polluted history

Not all IPv4 addresses are equal. Blocks with a history of spam, abuse, or involvement in botnets can create problems with email deliverability, blocklists, and security filters. Cleaning up reputation takes time and expertise, and some damage is hard to fully undo.

This is why “clean” IP space commands higher prices. Providers who invest in strict abuse handling, proper allocations, and reputation monitoring end up with more valuable address space. When you pay for a high‑quality VPS or dedicated server IP, you are really paying for:

• Verified ownership and correct routing
• Clean or well‑managed reputation
• Fast response to abuse and blacklist issues

Lease vs. purchase: different risk profiles

Organizations with large and stable IP needs sometimes consider purchasing IPv4 blocks directly. That locks in long‑term availability, but also ties up capital in an asset whose future value is uncertain. Smaller teams almost always consume IPv4 indirectly through their hosting provider as a rental cost.

In our experience at dchost.com, the trade‑off is simple:

• Buying makes sense if you have a predictable, multi‑year need for thousands of IPs and want maximum routing control.
• Leasing via your hosting is usually better if your footprint changes frequently or you mostly run customer‑facing web workloads where IPv6 adoption can offset IPv4 needs.

The rapid price increases of the last years make speculative purchases riskier; your priority should be flexibility and a clear roadmap to reduce IPv4 dependence over time.

Who Feels the Pain First: Real‑World Impact on Hosting and Online Businesses

IPv4 price inflation does not live in isolation. It flows directly into hosting plans, colocation contracts, and network design decisions. Here’s how we see it affect different types of customers.

Agencies and resellers with many small sites

Agencies that host dozens or hundreds of client sites often grew up on shared hosting or small VPS plans, each with its own IPv4. As IPv4 costs rise, it becomes less economical to scatter projects across many underutilized servers. We regularly help these customers consolidate into fewer, well‑sized VPS or dedicated servers, using name‑based virtual hosting so multiple domains can safely share the same IP.

If you are in this situation, our guide on choosing between dedicated servers and VPS for your business can help you decide when consolidation makes sense and how to keep performance high while using fewer IPv4 addresses.

SaaS platforms and multi‑tenant apps

SaaS providers sometimes start by assigning a dedicated IPv4 to each large customer, especially if they need custom SSL certificates or branded subdomains. With current pricing, this approach quickly becomes expensive. A multi‑tenant architecture with shared IPs, SNI‑based SSL, and smart routing is now the norm rather than a nice‑to‑have.

We see more teams redesigning their apps along these lines, very similar to the patterns we described in our article on multi‑tenant architectures for SaaS and choosing the right hosting infrastructure. The upside: better IP utilization, lower costs, and simpler routing.

E‑commerce and mail‑heavy workloads

E‑commerce stores and marketing‑heavy businesses feel IPv4 inflation through email. Dedicated IPs for transactional mail, newsletters, and domain‑based reputation used to be inexpensive. Now, providers have to balance the cost of giving every customer a dedicated send‑IP against shared IP pools with stricter policies and monitoring.

If you rely heavily on email from your own servers, remember that IP cost is only one piece. DNS records like SPF, DKIM, DMARC and reverse DNS are just as important. Our guide on improving email deliverability with SPF, DKIM, DMARC and rDNS shows you how to get the most value from each IP you already have.

Colocation and on‑premise expansions

Colocation customers who bring their own servers but rely on the data center or hosting provider for IP space now find that IP line items can rival power or rack space in cost. Requests for large, contiguous IPv4 blocks are especially challenging to fulfill without substantial surcharges.

For these customers, we often work on a hybrid strategy: use a modest public IPv4 allocation for edge services, and keep the internal network purely private with NAT and IPv6 wherever possible. This keeps IP rental costs under control without limiting growth.

Practical Strategies to Control Costs Without Breaking Your Network

IPv4 prices are not going back to the old days, but you do have real control over how much you spend. The key is to treat IPv4 as a scarce and expensive resource, just like high‑performance NVMe storage or premium bandwidth.

1. Inventory and reclaim unused IPv4 space

Before buying more IPs, perform a simple audit:

• List all servers, VPS instances, and services using public IPv4.
• Identify test, staging, or retired projects that no longer need their own IP.
• Look for services that could safely share an IP (for example, multiple HTTPS sites using SNI).

It’s common to find 10–30% of IP space that can be reclaimed with minimal impact. On larger deployments, this alone can offset a full year of IPv4 price increases.

2. Use name‑based virtual hosting and SNI for HTTPS

In the early days of SSL, one dedicated IP per certificate was the norm. Today, Server Name Indication (SNI) allows multiple HTTPS sites to share the same IPv4, each with its own certificate. Modern browsers and devices fully support this.

If you still allocate “one IP per HTTPS site” out of habit, switching to SNI on your web servers (Nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed, etc.) can dramatically reduce your IP requirements without any customer‑visible change.

3. Avoid using public IPv4 where private addressing is enough

Many internal services do not actually need globally routable IPv4. Examples include:

• Database servers only accessed from application servers
• Internal caches, search clusters, and message queues
• Private admin panels restricted by VPN or IP allowlists

Use RFC1918 private ranges with firewalls and, where necessary, VPNs instead of giving every component its own public IP. Our customers often combine this approach with separate database and application servers; if you are planning such a split, our guide on when to separate database and application servers for MySQL and PostgreSQL can help you design the network without overusing IPv4.

4. Right‑size your hosting footprint

Since every additional server often means at least one more IPv4, over‑provisioned infrastructure quietly amplifies your IP costs. Techniques to keep this under control include:

• Consolidating lightly used VPS instances into fewer, better‑sized servers
• Upgrading to NVMe storage or more RAM instead of adding another low‑spec instance
• Using load balancers and autoscaling logic where appropriate, rather than always adding static nodes

We detailed this mindset in our article on cutting hosting costs with right‑sized VPS, bandwidth and storage. IPv4 should be part of the same optimization conversation.

5. Plan ahead for IP reputation

Because clean IPs are so valuable, protecting the reputation of the addresses you already use is a direct cost‑saving move. That means:

• Strict abuse handling and timely response to complaints
• Rate limiting and WAF rules to reduce malicious traffic
• Segregating risky workloads (for example, user‑generated content or bulk email) onto their own IPs

At dchost.com, we invest heavily in monitoring and security hardening for our servers so that our IP space remains clean and valuable. As a customer, following best practices on your side helps keep your allocated IPs off blocklists and avoids the need to request (and pay for) new addresses just to escape a polluted history.

Building an IPv6‑First Roadmap While IPv4 Stays Expensive

You cannot simply drop IPv4 overnight, but you also should not plan a future where every new service needs a fresh public IPv4. The realistic path is dual‑stack: keep IPv4 for compatibility, and move as much traffic as possible to IPv6.

Why IPv6 matters directly to your IPv4 budget

Every connection that uses IPv6 instead of IPv4 reduces pressure on your IPv4 pool. Over time, as more of your traffic becomes IPv6‑native, you can:

• Host more services behind a smaller set of IPv4 addresses
• Delay or reduce the need for new IPv4 allocations
• Experiment with IPv6‑only internal services with translation at the edge

We have written extensively about this shift in our series on IPv6, including how to accelerate IPv6 adoption without breaking existing systems. The core message is simple: every step toward IPv6 is also a step away from runaway IPv4 costs.

Enabling IPv6 on your servers and apps

On the practical side, enabling IPv6 usually involves:

• Requesting IPv6 ranges from your hosting provider
• Configuring IPv6 addresses on your VPS or dedicated servers
• Adding AAAA records for your domains in DNS
• Ensuring firewalls, load balancers, and application code fully support IPv6

On many modern OS images and panels, the OS‑level part is straightforward. If you want a step‑by‑step walkthrough, our IPv6 setup and configuration guide for VPS servers shows exactly how to bring IPv6 online and verify it in production.

Accept that IPv4 will stick around—but in a smaller role

Even with aggressive IPv6 adoption, IPv4 will remain part of the internet for many years. Legacy systems, certain VPNs, embedded devices, and some third‑party integrations will continue to require IPv4 connectivity. The realistic goal is not to eliminate IPv4 entirely, but to:

• Stop tying every new project to a dedicated IPv4 from day one
• Move high‑volume and internal traffic to IPv6
• Reserve IPv4 for edge compatibility and special cases

In our own infrastructure planning at dchost.com, we assume IPv4 remains important but scarce. That mindset keeps network designs lean and resistant to further price increases.

How We at dchost.com Approach IP Address Planning

As a hosting provider offering domains, shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and colocation, we live inside this IPv4 pricing story every day. The decisions we make to manage our own IP space are the same principles we recommend to our customers.

Conservative IPv4 allocation, generous IPv6

We treat public IPv4 as a premium resource. That means careful allocation policies, strong abuse handling, and continuous monitoring of IP reputation. At the same time, we encourage and support IPv6 across our services, so you can deploy dual‑stack architectures without friction.

Network designs that stretch each IPv4 further

In typical deployments, we help customers:

• Use shared IPv4s with proper HTTPS SNI and isolation for most websites
• Reserve dedicated IPs only where they bring real value (for example, certain mail or security setups)
• Move internal components to private addressing and/or IPv6

These patterns make it possible to grow capacity—more sites, more apps, more users—without linearly growing IPv4 spend.

Guidance instead of guesswork

IPv4 planning is easier when it is part of a bigger conversation about scaling, security, and performance. We connect IP decisions to related topics such as SSL/TLS, database separation, and high availability. If you are re‑architecting or planning a new project, our broader resources—from keeping SSL/TLS up to date on your servers to detailed analysis of why IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs—are designed to help you build systems that age well, even as the IP market keeps changing.

Conclusion: Treat IPv4 as Scarce, Not Infinite

IPv4 address prices are soaring because a finite resource has met relentless demand and a new asset market. The exhaustion of free pools, explosive growth in data center capacity, stricter transfer policies, and the financialization of IP space all contribute to a reality where public IPv4 is expensive and getting more so. That might sound daunting, but in practical terms it gives you a clear design constraint: IPv4 is scarce—plan accordingly.

If you inventory and reclaim unused addresses, lean on SNI and shared IPs where safe, avoid wasting public IPv4 on internal services, and actively roll out IPv6, you can keep your hosting and infrastructure budget predictable. At dchost.com, we build our own network on these principles and help customers do the same across shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, and colocation. If you are wondering how to grow your projects without letting IPv4 costs spiral, the next step is simple: take a fresh look at where every public IP is used today, decide where IPv6 can take over, and adjust your architecture so each remaining IPv4 truly earns its keep.