IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges Explained

IPv4 addresses are becoming one of the most expensive pieces of your infrastructure that you never see on a diagram. If you run websites, SaaS, APIs or on‑prem services that touch the public internet, you are already feeling it: higher IP fees from providers, stricter justification questions, and more frequent discussions about NAT and IPv6 in planning meetings. In this article we will unpack what is really happening behind these price surges, why IPv4 exhaustion is structural (not a temporary bubble), and what you can realistically do about it without breaking your stack. We will look at how IPv4 scarcity affects hosting, email deliverability, SSL, SEO, and multi‑tenant architectures, then walk through a practical transition plan where IPv4 remains available but no longer a bottleneck. As the team behind dchost.com, we will also share how we approach IPv4 and IPv6 on our own hosting, VPS, dedicated server and colocation platforms so you can plan your next few years with clear expectations instead of guesswork.

What IPv4 Exhaustion Really Means in 2025

A quick reminder: what is IPv4 and why is it finite?

IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) is the addressing system that has powered the internet since the 1980s. An IPv4 address looks like 203.0.113.42 and is made up of 32 bits. That gives us about 4.3 billion theoretical addresses. At the time IPv4 was designed, that number felt infinite. Today, it is clearly not.

These addresses are not given out randomly. They are allocated in blocks by regional registries (RIRs) like RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, etc., and then assigned by ISPs, data centers and hosting providers to end users. Over the last two decades, consumer broadband, mobile devices, IoT, VPNs, CDNs, and SaaS platforms have driven demand into billions of addresses. The result: all RIRs have reached some form of “exhaustion phase”, meaning they no longer have large, easily assignable free pools of IPv4.

Runout does not mean the internet stops

Exhaustion does not mean “no IPv4 left anywhere”. It means there is almost no unallocated IPv4 left at the registries. The majority of addresses are already sitting in:

• Existing ISP and data center allocations
• Large organizations that received big blocks in the 1990s and 2000s
• Legacy /8 and /16 ranges that are only partially used

From your point of view as a hosting or infrastructure buyer, this changes how IPs are acquired. Instead of requesting new space cheaply from a registry, providers increasingly buy, sell, or lease IPv4 blocks on a secondary market. That market is where price surges are happening—and you see them passed through as higher per‑IP fees.

Why this is not going to reverse

There is no way to “add a few more” IPv4 addresses. The 32‑bit space is fixed. A few reclaim and recovery projects (returning unused space, fixing misallocated ranges) help at the margins, but they do not change the fundamentals. At the same time, more users and services keep coming online. Even if your own footprint stays stable, global demand for IPv4 continues to rise.

This is why we treat IPv4 at dchost.com as a scarce, expensive compatibility layer, and IPv6 as the only real long‑term solution. The rest of this article is about how to navigate that reality calmly and strategically.

Why IPv4 Address Prices Are Surging

The secondary market: where prices are really set

Once the registries stopped handing out large blocks easily, organizations that already held IPv4 space effectively became suppliers. Blocks are now traded and leased much like any other scarce asset. Prices are driven by:

• Block size and cleanliness: /24, /23, /22 blocks with clean reputation are much more valuable than huge legacy spaces full of abuse history.
• Geographic region and policies: Transfer rules differ slightly between regions, affecting liquidity and paperwork.
• Compliance overhead: Transfers require documentation, due diligence, registry approvals and often legal review.

This is the backdrop for headlines like why IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs and what you can do about it. When a provider has to pay more per IP on this market, plus deal with transfer and reputation cleanup, per‑IP fees inevitably rise for end customers.

Why “clean” IPv4 costs even more

Not all IPv4 space is equal. An IP block used for spam, malware hosting or aggressive scanning can end up on dozens of blocklists and reputation systems. Cleaning it up takes time and sometimes months of good behavior.

For hosting, email and SaaS workloads, clean IPv4 reputation is critical:

• Email from a “dirty” block lands in spam or is rejected completely.
• Some APIs and services rate‑limit or block traffic from known abusive ranges.
• Security filters and WAFs may treat known‑bad blocks more aggressively.

As a result, clean, well‑documented space now trades at a premium. When you see a provider charge more for dedicated IPs but also emphasize monitoring abuse and reputation, that cost is often tied to the extra work of maintaining clean allocations.

Operational costs hidden inside a single IPv4

An IPv4 address is not just a number in a config file. Each additional public IP adds operational tasks for a provider:

• Routing, BGP and network design complexity
• Firewall and DDoS shielding rules per range
• Abuse handling, log reviews and incident responses tied to that IP
• Reverse DNS, PTR records and DNS management

All of this scales with the number of IPv4s in use. In a world where new IPv4 is expensive to acquire, providers must justify this overhead carefully. That is why you now see stricter allocation forms, usage justification and sometimes audits of IP utilization.

IPv4 vs IPv6 economics

Compare this to IPv6, where providers can receive huge address space (like /32, /29, etc.) and subdivide it generously with minimal incremental cost. There is effectively no scarcity pressure on IPv6, which is one reason we encourage customers to turn it on even if they still need IPv4 for compatibility. If you want a deeper dive into this economic and technical contrast, our article why IPv6 adoption is suddenly everywhere and what it means for your site walks through what we are seeing in real customer projects.

How IPv4 Scarcity Impacts Your Hosting and Apps

Shared hosting and SNI: many sites, one IP

On shared hosting platforms, dozens or hundreds of domains can share a single IPv4 address thanks to name‑based virtual hosting and SNI (Server Name Indication) in TLS. This model delays the impact of IPv4 scarcity for smaller sites, because each extra domain does not need an extra IP.

However, if you rely on dedicated IPs for legacy reasons (old SSL stacks, special routing, IP‑based access control), you will feel the price pressure much sooner. In modern stacks, almost all use cases for “I must have a dedicated IPv4 for each domain” have disappeared, except a few niche workflows and some enterprise integrations.

VPS and dedicated servers: the new normal for IP allocation

For VPS and dedicated servers, the pattern we see across the industry is clear:

• 1 primary IPv4 per server included
• Additional IPv4s billed monthly, often with usage justification
• Generous IPv6 (/64 per server or similar) included at no extra cost

At dchost.com, this is roughly how we design our plans as well. You can build multi‑domain, multi‑tenant platforms on a single IPv4 by using proper web server configuration, SNI and reverse proxies, while using IPv6 broadly to ease scaling pressure. If you are choosing a Linux distribution for your VPS and want clean separation of services on one IP, our guide choosing a Linux distro for your VPS can help you pick a platform you are comfortable automating.

NAT and CGNAT: when you don’t control the public IPv4

To stretch their IPv4 space, many ISPs and some providers rely on NAT (Network Address Translation) or even CGNAT (Carrier‑Grade NAT). That means many customer devices or servers sit behind one (or a few) shared public IPv4s.

This works fine for outbound connections (browsing, API calls) but is painful for services that rely on inbound connections:

• Self‑hosted services behind CGNAT are harder to reach from the public internet.
• Debugging port forwarding issues becomes more complex.
• Reputation problems on a shared IP impact many users at once.

For serious production hosting, we strongly favor offering each VPS or dedicated server its own public IPv4 plus full IPv6 support, rather than pushing everything behind aggressive CGNAT. NAT can be used internally, but you should know exactly where your public demarcation point is.

Email deliverability: why “just one more IP” is not a magic fix

Rising IPv4 prices often tempt teams to squeeze mail, web, APIs and other workloads onto a single IP or a tiny pool. That is fine if you manage reputation carefully, but dangerous if you send marketing emails, transactional messages and bulk notifications in the same place as your normal web traffic.

A few practical points we see in real projects:

• Separate mail‑sending IPs or pools (still IPv4‑based for now) are often worth the cost.
• Warm‑up and consistent sending patterns matter more than rotating through many IPs.
• DNS and authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, rDNS) are just as important as the IP itself.

If you are revisiting your email setup in the context of IPv4 scarcity, our article Inbox or spam? A step‑by‑step guide to SPF, DKIM, DMARC and rDNS gives you a solid checklist to avoid throwing IPs at a problem that is really configuration‑related.

SEO, SSL and geolocation: separating myths from reality

We still meet teams who think they must change IPv4s for SEO, or that sharing an IP will kill rankings. That era is long gone. Modern search engines understand the scarcity of IPv4 and see hundreds of thousands of legitimate sites sharing IPs on large hosting platforms.

The real concerns look more like this:

• SSL/TLS: SNI solves most multi‑domain, one‑IP problems. Only ancient clients lack SNI support.
• Geolocation: The country of your IP can affect latency and some regional behaviors, but server location and CDN matter more than the specific IP number.
• Reputation: Sharing an IP with heavy spammers can have indirect effects, but reputable providers keep strict abuse controls to avoid this.

In other words: IPv4 scarcity does not have to damage your SEO or SSL plans, as long as you architect around the realities of modern TLS and search behavior.

Short‑Term Survival Strategies for IPv4 Scarcity

1. Audit and reclaim unused IPv4s

Before you ask for more IPv4s—or complain about pricing—start with a simple, honest audit:

• Which services truly require their own IPv4 (e.g. separate mail pools, special compliance zones)?
• Which services could share an IP via name‑based virtual hosting or reverse proxying?
• Are there old staging, test, or abandoned projects still holding onto IPs?

We often find that 10–30% of a customer’s allocated IPv4s are either idle or can be safely consolidated. Freeing those first gives you breathing room without touching your budget.

2. Move from IP‑per‑service to IP‑per‑edge

A common anti‑pattern is giving every microservice, container or VM its own public IPv4. In a world of cheap IPv4 that might have been acceptable. Today, it is wasteful and hard to secure.

A better pattern is to treat IPv4 as your edge layer only:

• Expose a small number of reverse proxies or load balancers on public IPv4s.
• Run your internal services on private IPv4 or IPv6 subnets behind those edges.
• Use hostnames and paths to route traffic to internal services.

This architecture matches well with the way we provision VPS and dedicated servers at dchost.com: your server gets a public IPv4 and an IPv6 range, and you are free to build internal networks behind it without extra public IPs.

3. Use SNI and modern TLS to share IPv4s safely

If you are still assigning a dedicated IPv4 per SSL certificate, it is time to modernize. Thanks to SNI, a single web server listening on one IPv4 can respond with different certificates based on the requested hostname.

Make sure:

• Your web server (Nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed, etc.) has SNI properly configured.
• You test legacy clients if you serve very old devices or embedded systems.
• Your certificate management (ACME, Let’s Encrypt, ZeroSSL) is automated and centralized.

If you are strengthening your TLS setup while you are at it, our guide TLS 1.3, OCSP stapling and modern ciphers on Nginx/Apache shows how to get top‑tier security on shared IPs without extra drama.

4. Reserve dedicated IPv4s for workloads that really need them

In most of the environments we see, there are only a few workloads that truly justify their own IPv4s:

• High‑volume outbound mail clusters
• Customer‑isolated dedicated servers with strict compliance requirements
• Legacy integrations hard‑coded to specific IP allowlists
• Services with very specific geolocation or IP‑based licensing requirements

If you are paying a premium for extra IPv4s, aligning them with these workloads makes sense. Everything else can live behind proxies and shared IPs, especially when you have IPv6 available for clients that support it.

5. Be cautious with “cheap” IPv4 from unknown sources

Offers of very cheap IPv4 space from unverified brokers or resellers are usually cheap for a reason: reputation and risk. Attaching those addresses to production web or mail workloads can create problems that take months to unwind.

We strongly prefer sourcing IPv4 through official registry transfers, transparent leases or reputable upstreams, and we maintain strict abuse handling at dchost.com so that our ranges stay clean. In the long run, a small pool of clean IPv4s is vastly better than a large pool of tainted addresses.

Why IPv6 Is the Only Real Long‑Term Fix

From 4.3 billion to “effectively unlimited”

IPv6 uses 128‑bit addresses, written in hexadecimal groups like 2001:db8::1. That gives us 340 undecillion addresses (a 39‑digit number). In practice, it is effectively unlimited for every realistic use case.

The design goal of IPv6 is simple: every device, VM, container, IoT sensor and virtual interface that needs a unique address can have one, without tricks like NAT. This removes the fundamental scarcity that is driving IPv4 prices up.

Performance and simplicity benefits

Moving to IPv6 is not just about “more addresses”. Real‑world benefits include:

• Cleaner routing: No carrier‑grade NAT layers in the path.
• Stable addressing: Servers and services can keep addresses for years.
• End‑to‑end connectivity: Easier peer‑to‑peer, VoIP, and API connections.

In a dual‑stack setup (both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled), many clients and CDNs will prefer IPv6 automatically when available, which gradually shifts traffic off your scarce IPv4 space.

If you want a practical, admin‑level guide, our article IPv6 setup and configuration for your VPS server walks through enabling IPv6, configuring firewalls and testing connectivity step‑by‑step.

Global adoption is already well underway

We have passed the “experimental” phase of IPv6. Large ISPs, CDNs, mobile carriers and content platforms now serve a significant share of their traffic over IPv6. In some regions, mobile networks are essentially IPv6‑first with IPv4 provided via translation.

From our perspective running infrastructure at dchost.com, the shift in the last few years has been clear:

• More customer projects ask for IPv6 from day one.
• More enterprise RFPs explicitly require dual‑stack connectivity.
• Monitoring graphs show a steadily rising share of IPv6 traffic.

Our deep dive surge in IPv6 adoption: what it really means for your network explores adoption curves and practical decision points if you want to time your own transition sensibly.

IPv6‑only experiments are already in production

For some workloads, teams are already experimenting with IPv6‑only servers plus NAT64/DNS64 to reach legacy IPv4‑only resources. For web workloads behind modern CDNs and DNS, this can work surprisingly well.

We have written about a real‑world example of this in the quiet aha moment that sent us down the IPv6‑only rabbit hole, where we walk through running websites on an IPv6‑only VPS and bridging back to IPv4 when necessary. While this is still an advanced pattern, it shows where the industry is heading for cost‑efficient scaling.

A Practical Transition Plan You Can Start Now

Step 1: Clarify your IPv4 use cases

Start by listing where you truly need public IPv4:

• Inbound public services (web, APIs, VPN gateways)
• Outbound email sending
• Legacy partner integrations with IP allowlists
• Public DNS and anycast services

Everything else—internal microservices, databases, background workers—can safely live behind NAT or on private IPv4/IPv6 ranges.

Step 2: Turn on dual‑stack wherever you can

For each public service where your hosting or data center supports it, enable both IPv4 and IPv6:

• Add AAAA records alongside A records in DNS.
• Ensure your web server listens on both IPv4 and IPv6.
• Update firewalls to handle IPv6 explicitly (not just “mirror IPv4”).

This dual‑stack phase can last years. The goal is not to drop IPv4 overnight, but to let more and more clients reach you over IPv6, reducing pressure on your IPv4 pool naturally. Our article Ready for IPv6? A no‑drama dual‑stack playbook shares a field‑tested checklist to do this without surprises.

Step 3: Clean up DNS and SSL assumptions

As you roll out IPv6, a few common assumptions can bite you:

• Hard‑coded IPv4 literals in application configs, env files or mobile apps.
• Firewall rules that only consider IPv4 subnets.
• SSL offload devices or WAFs that are IPv4‑only.

Plan a small discovery sprint: search for literal IPs in configs, review inbound firewall policies, and make sure your TLS termination points can speak IPv6. This is also a good time to revisit your HTTP security headers and HSTS settings; our guide on HTTP security headers helps you do that without breaking things.

Step 4: Build new services as “IPv6‑first, IPv4‑compatible”

For greenfield projects, flip the mindset:

• Design address plans and security groups assuming IPv6 is the primary stack.
• Add IPv4 for public edges and specific compatibility needs.
• Use hostnames and DNS as the source of truth; never depend on fixed IPv4 literals.

This future‑proofs your architecture: as IPv4 gets more expensive or constrained, you will not have to refactor your entire addressing and routing model. You will simply adjust how many IPv4 edges you maintain.

Step 5: Align your hosting strategy with the new reality

When choosing hosting, VPS, dedicated servers or colocation, evaluate providers with these questions in mind:

• Do they include IPv6 by default on all services?
• Can they provide dual‑stack connectivity and proper reverse DNS on both IPv4 and IPv6?
• How do they handle IPv4 allocation, abuse and reputation management?

At dchost.com, we design our platform around dual‑stack support and clear, documented IP policies so you can plan usage years ahead. Whether you are moving from shared hosting to a VPS, or colocating your own hardware, we can help you map out a realistic IPv4/IPv6 plan instead of improvising under pressure.

How We Approach IPv4 and IPv6 at dchost.com

IPv4 as a scarce compatibility layer

We treat IPv4 as something valuable that should be used where it delivers real business value, not just out of habit. That means:

• Including a reasonable number of IPv4 addresses with hosting, VPS and dedicated servers.
• Allowing additional IPv4s where justified (mail, isolation, compliance), with clear policies.
• Proactively monitoring abuse and reputation to keep our ranges clean and useful.

This helps us shield customers from the worst of the secondary market volatility, while still being honest that IPv4 has a real cost we cannot ignore.

IPv6 everywhere by default

On the IPv6 side, our goal is simple: if the network or platform supports it, you should have IPv6 available. For you, that means:

• VPS and dedicated servers with routable IPv6 ranges included.
• Colocation services with dual‑stack connectivity options.
• Support for AAAA records, reverse DNS and firewalling on IPv6.

We invest in IPv6 routing, monitoring and documentation so that you can adopt it at your own pace. When you are ready to go deeper, our dedicated guide on how fast you should transform your network for IPv6 can help you match technical readiness with business timelines.

Helping you migrate without downtime

Address changes are always sensitive. DNS propagation, SSL, email, application configs—there are many places where an IP sneaks in. We have helped customers move from other providers, from on‑prem to our data centers, and from IPv4‑only to dual‑stack without downtime.

If you want a taste of how we think about migrations, our zero‑downtime cPanel‑to‑cPanel migration playbook shows how careful DNS, TTL and incremental sync planning can make moves surprisingly calm—even when IP addresses change.

Bringing It All Together

IPv4 exhaustion and price surges are not a temporary spike; they are the visible symptom of a protocol that has reached its natural limit. On the supply side, registries have no large free pools left, and clean IPv4 blocks trade at increasing prices on a secondary market. On the demand side, more users, more devices and more services keep appearing every year. In between, hosting providers, ISPs and data centers must carefully manage a finite resource while still giving you the flexibility to grow.

The way forward is not to hoard IPv4 or chase the cheapest possible IPs at any cost. It is to treat IPv4 as a scarce but necessary compatibility layer and accelerate your adoption of IPv6 wherever it makes sense. In practice, that means auditing and consolidating your IPv4 usage, building IP‑per‑edge architectures, enabling dual‑stack across your public services, and designing new projects as IPv6‑first. As the team behind dchost.com, we are doing exactly that in our own infrastructure and for our customers across shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and colocation.

If you are reviewing your IP strategy, planning a migration, or simply worried about rising IPv4 line items on your invoices, talk to us. We can help you design a realistic roadmap that keeps your services online, your costs predictable and your network ready for the next decade—without waiting for the next IPv4 price surge to force your hand.