IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges: Practical Strategies for Hosting Teams

IPv4 addresses have quietly turned into one of the most sensitive cost items in modern hosting. A few years ago, you could request a handful of IPv4s for new servers and barely notice the impact on your bill. Today, the same request often triggers a cost discussion in every capacity, finance and architecture meeting. Scarcity is no longer theoretical: regional internet registries (RIRs) have effectively exhausted their free IPv4 pools, and prices on the transfer and leasing markets keep climbing.

In this article, we will look at what IPv4 exhaustion really means in 2026, why prices are rising so fast, and—most importantly—what you can do about it as someone responsible for hosting, domains, VPS, dedicated servers or colocation. We will translate IP economics into concrete technical and budgeting actions, share practical scenarios from real hosting environments, and show how to gradually reduce your dependence on IPv4 without breaking websites, email or SEO. All perspectives are from our day-to-day experience operating infrastructure at dchost.com.

What IPv4 Exhaustion Really Means Today

A quick refresher on the IPv4 address space

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses. That means a theoretical maximum of about 4.3 billion unique addresses (2³²). It sounded enormous when the protocol was designed, but it is tiny compared to today’s number of devices and services:

• Every public-facing server usually needs at least one IPv4.
• Many organizations still rely on dedicated IPv4s for SSL, email reputation, VPN gateways and legacy systems.
• Everything from industrial IoT to home routers, mobile providers and enterprise networks consumes public space, directly or via carrier-grade NAT.

Because of historic allocations, large blocks are held by organizations that obtained them decades ago when policies were far looser. A big part of the theoretical address space is effectively locked away or inefficiently used. That makes the practical, tradable IPv4 supply much smaller than 4.3 billion.

How the RIR pools ran dry

Global IPv4 allocation is managed by RIRs such as RIPE NCC (Europe, Middle East), ARIN (North America), APNIC (Asia-Pacific), LACNIC (Latin America) and AFRINIC (Africa). Over the last decade, each region has successively hit “exhaustion”: there are no significant free IPv4 blocks left for standard allocation. Instead, we have:

• Tiny last-resort allocations for newcomers (usually /24s with strict justification).
• Transfer markets, where organizations buy and sell IPv4 space via brokers.
• Leasing markets, where holders rent out their unused addresses.

As a result, IPv4 has turned into a commodity with market-driven pricing. If you want more addresses for your hosting footprint, you either pay brokers/lessors directly or you pay your hosting provider, who has to recover these rising costs through IP fees or general pricing.

We cover this technical background in even more depth in our detailed analysis of IPv4 exhaustion and price increases, but here we’ll stay focused on the consequences and your options.

Why IPv4 Prices Keep Climbing

1. Real scarcity and inelastic demand

Most hosting and network teams cannot simply stop using IPv4. Even if you are enthusiastic about IPv6, you cannot force every visitor, ISP and partner to enable IPv6 overnight. That makes demand for IPv4 inelastic: even when prices rise, consumption only slowly decreases.

At the same time, supply is strictly limited. New IPv4s are not being created, only moved between holders. Classical economics apply: when supply is fixed and demand continues, prices trend up until enough people either adopt alternatives (IPv6, NAT, IP sharing) or reduce usage aggressively.

2. Secondary markets and broker dynamics

Because almost all new IPv4 space comes from transfers, brokers and leasing platforms have become central players. They provide real value (compliance checks, route validation, contract standardization), but they also introduce:

• Transaction costs: legal work, escrow, KYC/AML, technical due diligence.
• Speculation: some holders keep addresses off the market expecting further price increases.
• Fragmentation: many small blocks (/24s, /23s) instead of large contiguous ranges, which can increase routing complexity.

All these elements push the usable price per IP higher than the “raw” scarcity alone would dictate.

3. Policy changes at RIRs and ARIN/RIPE updates

RIRs periodically update their policies around transfers, justification and inter-region moves. When rules tighten or paperwork becomes heavier, some holders delay selling or leasing their space. That further constrains short-term supply and reinforces upward price pressure.

If you manage larger IP blocks or plan to acquire them, it is worth following policy updates closely. We summarized the latest transfer changes and their operational impact in our article on ARIN’s updated IPv4 transfer policies and what they mean for network budgets.

4. Compliance, security and dedicated IPv4 requirements

Some use cases still push you toward dedicated IPv4 addresses even when name-based virtual hosting is technically possible:

• Certain payment providers or regulatory frameworks prefer or require dedicated IPs for e-commerce platforms, VPN gateways or critical APIs.
• Email deliverability strategies often favor separate IPv4s per sending domain or business unit to isolate reputation.
• Legacy applications and appliances may still assume a one-service-per-IP model.

Each of these requirements competes for the same scarce resource and makes it harder to reduce overall demand quickly.

5. Operational overhead priced into hosting services

For a provider like dchost.com, IPv4 costs are not just the purchase or lease price. We also deal with:

• Abuse management: handling spam complaints, DDoS, and blacklisting incidents.
• Routing and infrastructure: BGP announcements, filtering, DDoS protection and monitoring.
• Admin workflows: IP planning, justification, documentation and audits.

As the per-IP market value rises, the cost of protecting that asset and handling its lifecycle justifies higher per-IP monthly fees in hosting plans.

How IPv4 Price Surges Hit Your Hosting Stack

Per-server costs grow even if CPU and disk stay the same

Imagine you are planning a refresh of your VPS fleet or dedicated servers. CPU, RAM and NVMe storage prices might be flat or even falling. Yet the total cost of ownership per server goes up because you need 5–20 IPv4 addresses for websites, email, VPN and management.

We’ve seen customers in cost reviews discover that IPv4 alone can represent 15–25% of their total hosting bill, especially for fleets with many small VPS instances where each one expects a dedicated IPv4. When IP prices double, that share grows even further.

Legacy assumptions break: “one IP per site” is no longer free

Many older architectures were built on the idea that IPs are cheap:

• Each new website gets its own IP “just in case”.
• Each client on reseller hosting gets a dedicated IP by default.
• Test/staging environments use the same IP model as production.

Under current market conditions, these designs become financially painful. When we onboard new customers to our VPS or reseller hosting at dchost.com, one of the first discussions we have is around how many IPv4s they really need versus what can be handled with shared IPs, SNI and proper DNS/SSL configuration.

Email, blacklists and the temptation to “throw more IPs at it”

Email deliverability problems often tempt teams to buy additional IPv4s: separate IPs for transactional vs marketing mail, for each brand, or even per campaign. While dedicated IPs can be part of a serious deliverability strategy, indiscriminately multiplying IPv4s is now an expensive habit.

Our approach is to treat dedicated IPs as strategic assets: reserve them for high-volume transactional mail or critical domains, combine them with solid SPF, DKIM, DMARC and rDNS configuration, and monitor reputation carefully instead of simply adding more addresses. If you want to deepen your email side, our guide on SPF, DKIM and DMARC for cPanel and VPS email walks through those fundamentals.

Budgeting uncertainty for agencies and SaaS providers

Agencies, hosting resellers and SaaS platforms that bundle hosting into their service face another challenge: long-term price stability. When IPv4 market prices jump, you may be locked into fixed-price contracts with your own clients. Margins get squeezed unless you plan ahead and build room for IP cost evolution into your pricing model.

We see this especially in multi-tenant architectures where each tenant was initially promised a dedicated IP “forever”. Revisiting that promise and moving toward shared IPs plus IPv6 requires careful communication, migration planning and sometimes contractual updates.

Technical Tactics to Reduce IPv4 Dependence

1. Embrace IPv6 and run dual stack where it matters

The most sustainable answer to IPv4 scarcity is not a clever financial trick; it is adopting IPv6. IPv6 has a 128-bit address space, which is effectively inexhaustible for human purposes. As more ISPs, mobile networks and corporate gateways enable IPv6, a growing share of your visitors can reach your services without consuming IPv4 at all.

We strongly recommend a dual-stack strategy for most public-facing workloads:

• Keep IPv4 for compatibility, but add IPv6 (AAAA records) to your DNS.
• Ensure your web server, reverse proxy and load balancer configurations support IPv6 listeners.
• Test SEO, analytics and logging to ensure IPv6 traffic is handled and visible.

If you want a broader view of global trends, our article on rising IPv6 adoption rates and how networks are transforming explains why this shift is accelerating and how it impacts hosting architecture.

2. Turn on IPv6 on your VPS and servers

On the practical side, enabling IPv6 on your servers is usually straightforward:

• Request IPv6 addresses or prefixes on your VPS, dedicated or colocation setup.
• Configure OS-level networking for IPv6 (static or SLAAC) and firewall rules.
• Update web server configs (Nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed) to listen on IPv6.
• Expose both A (IPv4) and AAAA (IPv6) DNS records for your domains.

We have a hands-on step-by-step walkthrough in our IPv6 setup and configuration guide for VPS servers, which covers both networking basics and real-world gotchas around firewalls, logs and SSL.

The more of your traffic moves over IPv6, the easier it becomes to justify aggressive IPv4 optimization without compromising user experience.

3. Use name-based virtual hosting and SNI aggressively

Technically, you can host hundreds—sometimes thousands—of websites on a single IPv4 address using:

• Name-based virtual hosts at the HTTP layer (Host header).
• Server Name Indication (SNI) at the TLS layer, so multiple SSL certificates share one IP.

Modern browsers and operating systems fully support SNI. The main deployment mistakes we still see are:

• Unnecessarily assigning dedicated IPv4s “to be safe” even when SNI is available.
• Keeping old one-IP-per-domain habits because migration tooling was never revisited.

On our shared and reseller hosting platforms at dchost.com, we design packages so that SNI and shared IPv4s are the default. Dedicated IPs are reserved for cases where they actually make sense (specific email setups, certain compliance needs, advanced routing scenarios).

4. Centralize services behind reverse proxies and load balancers

Another powerful pattern is to decouple public IPs from backend servers using reverse proxies or load balancers:

• Expose a limited number of IPv4 addresses on an edge tier (Nginx, HAProxy or similar).
• Route traffic from the edge to many backend VPS or containers using private IP subnets.
• Mix IPv4 and IPv6 freely on the internal side depending on your environment.

This allows you to scale application nodes without consuming more public IPv4s. You only grow the number of public IPs when you truly need separate entry points (for example, different security policies, protocols or geographies).

5. Audit and reclaim unused or low-value IPv4s

Every IPv4 you can free is a direct cost saving. We routinely perform IP audits with customers and typically find:

• Old staging or test servers with dedicated IPv4s that are no longer needed.
• Legacy DNS records pointing to decommissioned IPs.
• Multiple IPs allocated per customer or project “just in case”.

A structured cleanup usually includes:

1. Exporting all IP allocations from your control panel, IPAM or documentation.
2. Tagging each IP with a business owner, project and purpose.
3. Verifying actual usage (traffic, open ports, DNS, email logs).
4. Consolidating services where possible and releasing unused IPv4s.

This might sound tedious, but customers are often surprised by how much address space they can reclaim in a single pass—especially after years of incremental growth.

6. Treat dedicated IPv4 as a premium resource

Instead of defaulting to dedicated IPv4s, define clear internal rules such as:

• Dedicated IPv4 allowed only for workloads with regulatory, deliverability or routing justification.
• Periodic review of all dedicated IP assignments (for example, every 6–12 months).
• Documented business owner for each dedicated IP, so costs and decisions are transparent.

On our side at dchost.com, we encourage customers to classify IPv4 requests along these lines. It leads to healthier planning conversations and avoids surprises when market prices move again.

Strategic Planning: Forecasting and Budgeting for IPv4

1. Build an IPv4 usage and cost baseline

Before you can manage IPv4 risk, you need a baseline. We recommend tracking at least:

• Total number of IPv4s in use, by environment (production, staging, dev) and by type (web, email, VPN, infrastructure).
• Per-IP cost: how much each IPv4 costs you per month, including any surcharges in hosting plans.
• Growth trend: how many new IPs are added per month or per project.

From there, run a simple projection: “If we continue at this pace and market prices increase by X% per year, what will our IPv4 spend look like in 2–3 years?” That is often enough to convince stakeholders that an IPv6 roadmap and IP consolidation strategy are not “nice to have” but financially necessary.

2. Integrate IPv4 into your overall hosting cost optimization

IPv4 is just one part of your hosting cost structure, alongside CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth. The strongest plans treat these dimensions together. For example:

• Consolidating low-traffic sites onto fewer VPSs saves both compute and IPv4.
• Offloading heavy media to object storage + CDN can reduce bandwidth, CPU and the need for extra front-end servers (and their IPs).
• Rightsizing VPS resources stops you from paying for idle capacity and idle IP allocations.

If cost optimization is currently a priority, our guide on cutting hosting costs with proper VPS sizing, traffic and storage planning provides a structured framework. Simply add “IPv4 count and cost” as another metric in those same reviews.

3. Structure contracts and expectations around IP volatility

For agencies, resellers and SaaS platforms that resell hosting or embed it into their product, it is wise to treat IPv4 a bit like energy prices: volatile and external. Practical steps include:

• Separating IP fees from core service fees in your own contracts where possible, so price updates can be communicated transparently.
• Defining fair-use policies for IP usage per plan (for example, one IPv4 included, more available at a clearly stated fee).
• Communicating an IPv6 roadmap early to customers, so dual-stack and IP consolidation efforts are expected, not surprising.

From our side, we aim to provide stable, predictable IP pricing to dchost.com customers, but we also stay honest that we are all downstream from global IPv4 markets. The more we help customers move toward IPv6 and IP-efficient architectures, the less exposed everyone is to future price spikes.

4. Align IPv4 strategy with your long-term IPv6 plan

It is tempting to see IPv4 cost control and IPv6 adoption as separate projects. In reality, they are two sides of the same coin. A realistic roadmap often looks like this:

1. Short term (0–6 months): IP audit and cleanup, aggressive use of SNI and name-based hosting, standardization of IP justification.
2. Medium term (6–18 months): Dual-stack deployment for all public services, IPv6-ready logging/monitoring, DNS and SSL automation that handles AAAA records cleanly.
3. Long term (18+ months): New projects IPv6-first, IPv4 used primarily as a compatibility layer; experimentation with IPv6-only internal networks plus NAT64/DNS64 where appropriate.

If you want a deeper dive into planning and execution, our article on IPv4 exhaustion and price surges explained for real-world hosting lays out a road map that many of our customers have found useful as a starting point.

How We Approach IPv4 and IPv6 at dchost.com

Designing hosting plans with IPv4 scarcity in mind

At dchost.com, every new shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server and colocation design we create starts with an assumption: IPv4 will keep getting more expensive. That shapes how we architect our platform:

• Shared and reseller hosting rely on SNI and name-based virtual hosts by default, not per-site dedicated IPv4s.
• Dedicated IPv4s are available where they really matter (for example, specific email needs or network integrations), but we help customers avoid waste.
• Our network and data center expansion planning treats IPv4 as a constrained resource and IPv6 as the primary growth path.

Helping customers move toward IPv6 without breaking production

We are realistic: most real-world stacks cannot jump to IPv6-only overnight. That is why our support team spends a lot of time on practical dual-stack migrations:

• Enabling IPv6 on existing VPS and dedicated servers and updating firewalls safely.
• Configuring AAAA records and SSL certificates correctly for multi-domain setups.
• Testing SEO, analytics, logging and security tooling to ensure nothing silently breaks when IPv6 traffic arrives.

We have documented many of these lessons in various IPv6-focused guides on our blog, but we also know that each customer’s situation is unique. For complex multi-site or multi-tenant architectures, we often combine this with our experience from topics like custom domains and SSL management for multi-tenant SaaS to make sure IP and DNS strategies evolve together.

Bringing IPv4 into every capacity and cost discussion

Finally, we treat IPv4 as a first-class dimension in capacity planning, right alongside vCPU, RAM, storage IOPS and bandwidth. When a customer asks whether to scale out to multiple VPSs, move to a dedicated server or redesign their stack, we include:

• Expected number of IPv4s in each scenario.
• Room for growth without requesting new IPv4 allocations.
• Opportunities to increase IPv6 usage at the same time.

This habit—never ignoring IPv4 in architecture discussions—pays off quickly. It is much easier to design an IP-efficient environment from day one than to retrofit consolidation under financial pressure later.

Conclusion: Turning IPv4 Scarcity into a Strategic Advantage

IPv4 exhaustion and price surges are not temporary anomalies; they are the natural result of a finite resource finally hitting real-world limits. RIR pools are effectively empty, secondary markets are now the norm and dedicated IPv4s have become premium assets. For anyone responsible for domains, hosting, VPS, dedicated servers or colocation, ignoring this reality leads to budget surprises and rushed re-architecting later.

The good news is that you have options. By embracing IPv6 and dual stack, using SNI and name-based hosting aggressively, centralizing services behind reverse proxies, auditing and reclaiming unused addresses and treating dedicated IPv4s as strategic—not default—you can regain control over both your architecture and your budget. Combining these technical steps with thoughtful pricing and capacity planning turns IPv4 from a silent risk into a manageable line item.

At dchost.com, we live this balance every day in our own infrastructure and in the solutions we design for customers. If you are reviewing your hosting stack, planning a migration or simply worried about where IPv4 costs are heading, our team can help you map out a realistic path that protects both uptime and budget. Reach out with your current setup and goals, and we’ll work together on an IP strategy that keeps you future-ready instead of cornered by scarcity.