IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges: What It Means for Your Hosting

Why IPv4 Exhaustion Matters for Your Hosting, Right Now

IPv4 exhaustion used to sound like a distant, theoretical problem that only backbone providers and network operators worried about. Today it shows up directly in hosting invoices, server quotes, and project budgets. If you have ever asked why a dedicated IP suddenly became more expensive, why an extra IP on a VPS is limited, or why some providers push IPv6 so strongly, you are already seeing the impact of IPv4 exhaustion and price surges in practice.

From our perspective at dchost.com, this is no longer an abstract trend. Every capacity planning session, every new VPS or dedicated server product, and every colocation design we work on has to consider the real cost of IPv4. In this article, we will walk through what “IPv4 exhaustion and price surges” actually mean, how the market works behind the scenes, where the costs leak into your hosting bill, and—most importantly—what you can do in the next 12–36 months to protect your budget while keeping your infrastructure flexible and future‑proof.

How Did IPv4 Actually Run Out?

IPv4 addresses are 32‑bit numbers. That gives a theoretical maximum of about 4.3 billion unique addresses (2³²). When IPv4 was designed, this seemed unimaginably large. No one was thinking about billions of smartphones, IoT devices, cloud servers, and always‑online services.

To understand exhaustion, it helps to know how IPs are managed:

• IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) originally managed the global IPv4 pool.
• RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) such as RIPE NCC, ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC received large blocks from IANA and then allocated them to ISPs, hosting providers, and enterprises.
• ISPs and hosting providers then assigned smaller blocks or single IPs to end users and servers.

Two things happened in parallel:

• Huge early allocations: In the early internet, universities, corporations, and organizations received very large blocks (/8, /16) without any real efficiency pressure.
• Explosive growth: The web, mobile, always‑on broadband, and virtualization created an enormous appetite for public IPv4.

RIRs tried to slow exhaustion with stricter policies and by promoting private addressing (RFC 1918) and NAT. But by the 2010s, the free IPv4 pools of most RIRs hit “last /8” policies or fully ran out. That is when the game changed: new IPv4 addresses could no longer be given out cheaply from a central pool. The only way to get more is to buy or lease them from someone who already has them.

From Exhaustion to Price Surges: How the IPv4 Market Works

Once the free pool disappeared, IPv4 became a scarce, tradeable resource. You can think of it as a combination of real estate and radio spectrum: finite, regionally regulated, and only transferable via specific policies. This is where price surges come from.

There are three main drivers behind rising IPv4 prices:

• Limited supply: Legacy holders with big blocks decide if and when to sell. Many prefer to keep a “strategic reserve” instead of liquidating everything.
• Steadily growing demand: New projects, more servers, SaaS platforms, VPN services, and IoT backends all ask for public IPv4, even if they are technically capable of using IPv6.
• Policy friction: RIR transfer policies (for example, ARIN and RIPE rules) add administrative overhead, audits, wait times and documentation. That cost is priced into every transfer.

Transfer prices are not theoretical; brokers and RIR statistics show a clear upward trend over the last decade. We break down this trend in more detail in our article on how IPv4 address prices hit record highs and what that means for infrastructure budgets.

For a hosting provider like dchost.com, buying IPv4 blocks is now a strategic investment rather than a routine operational cost. Those blocks must then be:

• Documented and justified under RIR policies
• Routed, announced, and secured (RPKI, filtering, abuse handling)
• Carefully allocated to products (shared hosting, VPS, dedicated, colocation)

Every step has a cost. When you see a surcharge for a dedicated IPv4 on a VPS or a limit on how many IPs you can attach to a server, you are seeing the retail reflection of this wholesale market pressure.

Where IPv4 Costs Show Up in Your Hosting Bill

Most customers never buy or sell IP blocks directly. Instead, they feel IPv4 exhaustion and price surges in subtle ways inside hosting products. Here is where it usually appears.

1. Dedicated IPs on Shared Hosting

Traditional shared hosting used to treat IPv4 addresses as almost free. Many providers offered dedicated IPs cheaply or included them automatically. Today, you will increasingly see:

• Shared IPs by default for standard websites and email
• Extra charges for dedicated IPv4, especially if used for SSL, special applications, or legacy integrations
• Stricter justification: dedicated IPs are reserved for use cases that truly require them (certain payment gateways, whitelisting scenarios, or legacy systems that cannot use SNI)

Modern TLS with SNI allows many HTTPS sites to share a single IP securely. So from an infrastructure planning perspective, we encourage customers to use shared IPs whenever technically possible and save dedicated IPv4 for cases where it is truly necessary.

2. IPv4 on VPS Servers

On VPS plans, IPv4 scarcity is even more visible, because each VPS is usually associated with a primary public IP. What you will often see:

• One IPv4 included in the base VPS plan for SSH access, web hosting and email
• Paid add‑on IPs with clear limits (for example, up to a few additional addresses per VPS)
• Encouragement to use IPv6 for additional services, internal cluster traffic, or as the primary user‑facing protocol where possible

At dchost.com, we design our VPS offerings to give you a practical default IPv4 allocation while making IPv6 readily available. If you are planning a new project, it is worth reading our step‑by‑step IPv6 setup and configuration guide for your VPS server and considering dual‑stack from day one.

3. Dedicated Servers and Colocation

Dedicated servers and colocation customers are often more aware of IP needs, but IPv4 prices still affect them directly. Common patterns include:

• Smaller default blocks (for example, a /30 or a few IPs per server instead of a /29 or larger by default)
• Per‑IP or per‑block fees for additional IPv4 allocations
• Requirement to justify usage (reverse DNS delegation, routing plans, abuse policies)

For colocation customers bringing their own routers or IP space, policies from RIPE NCC or ARIN also come into play. Our articles on ARIN IPv4 transfer policy changes and operational lessons and RIPE NCC’s updated IPv4 allocation rules and IPv6 strategy dig deeper into how those regulations affect network planning.

4. Indirect Cost: Abuse, Blacklists and Reputational Risk

When IPv4 is scarce and expensive, every address becomes more valuable. Abuse incidents—spam, malware hosting, DDoS participation—can “taint” addresses and make them harder to use, or even get them blocked by major providers. Cleaning that up costs time and money, and those hidden costs also feed into pricing models.

This is why you will see stricter outbound email limits, abuse policies, and identity checks when requesting extra IPv4. It is not just about resource scarcity; it is also about protecting the long‑term reputation of finite address pools.

Technical Strategies to Reduce Your Dependence on IPv4

You cannot control global IPv4 prices, but you can control how intensely your infrastructure depends on IPv4. The goal is not to drop IPv4 overnight, but to design architectures where it is no longer the bottleneck or the biggest line item in your cost structure.

1. Embrace IPv6 and Dual‑Stack as a Default

IPv6 provides an enormous address space (2¹²⁸ addresses) and is the long‑term solution to IPv4 exhaustion. Adoption used to be slow, but that has changed significantly in the last few years. Google, large ISPs, and mobile networks now report substantial IPv6 traffic shares. We analyse these trends in our article on rising IPv6 adoption rates and what they mean for network design.

For your hosting stack, a realistic approach is dual‑stack:

• Keep IPv4 for compatibility and as a bridge for legacy users.
• Serve IPv6 to modern clients and networks whenever possible.
• Ensure internal services, APIs, and databases are reachable over IPv6 where it is practical.

On dchost.com VPS and dedicated servers, we recommend:

• Requesting IPv6 addresses or subnets with your servers when available.
• Configuring AAAA records alongside A records in DNS.
• Testing full dual‑stack reachability (web, API, email where relevant) before making IPv6 your default in documentation and client apps.

2. Use Name‑Based Virtual Hosting and SNI for HTTPS

Historically, each SSL site required a dedicated IPv4 because the TLS handshake happened before the HTTP Host header was sent. With SNI (Server Name Indication), the client tells the server which domain it wants during the TLS handshake, allowing multiple HTTPS sites to share the same IP.

What this means in practice:

• You rarely need a dedicated IPv4 per website anymore, as long as visitors use modern browsers and operating systems (which they almost all do).
• You can host dozens or hundreds of domains on a single IPv4, each with its own certificate, using SNI.
• Dedicated IPs are reserved for specific edge cases (legacy devices, special whitelisting rules, or some rare integrations).

If you are still running one IP per site out of habit, consolidating onto shared IPs with SNI is one of the simplest ways to reduce IPv4 consumption without changing your application logic.

3. Use NAT and Private Addressing for Internal Traffic

Many workloads do not need public IPv4 at all. Examples:

• Database servers only reachable from application servers
• Internal caches (Redis, Memcached) and message queues
• Background workers, cron processors, reporting services

These can live entirely on private IPv4 ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16) or pure IPv6 networks, behind NAT or internal routing. You then expose only a few carefully designed public endpoints:

• Load balancers or reverse proxies with both IPv4 and IPv6
• Public API gateways with IP‑based rate limiting and WAF
• VPN endpoints for admin access instead of direct SSH on every server

This architecture allows your application to scale horizontally (more containers, more VMs, more pods) without linearly increasing your public IPv4 consumption.

4. Clean Up, Consolidate and Reuse IPv4 Intelligently

Over time, many teams accumulate IP allocations that are underused or forgotten. A simple audit can reveal surprising waste:

• Test or staging servers with dedicated IPv4 that are rarely used
• Legacy services that could be moved behind a reverse proxy on a shared IP
• Deprecated projects that still hold active addresses and DNS records

An IPv4 hygiene checklist you can run regularly:

• List all servers and IPs, and tag each address with a service and owner.
• Check whether each public IP is still needed or can move behind a proxy/load balancer.
• Remove unused IPs from configurations, DNS, firewall rules, and VPNs.
• Return or release unused IPv4 to your pool so they can be reassigned within your environment.

This does not change global prices, but it can significantly reduce how many IPv4 addresses you actively pay for and manage.

5. Design New Services to Be IPv6‑Friendly from Day One

When planning new applications or microservices, it is much easier to support IPv6 at the design stage than to retrofit it later. Practical tips:

• Use libraries and frameworks that fully support IPv6 sockets and literals.
• Avoid hard‑coding IPv4 addresses; use DNS names everywhere.
• Test your staging environment in dual‑stack or even IPv6‑only modes to catch compatibility issues early.

We share more deployment patterns and migration stories in our article “So… Where Did All the IPv4 Go? The real story behind exhaustion and price surges”, which complements the practical strategies in this guide.

Real‑World Scenarios: Planning IPv4 on dchost.com

It is easier to reason about IPv4 usage with concrete scenarios. Here are a few we see often, and how we suggest planning IPs around them.

Scenario 1: A Small E‑Commerce Site on a VPS

You are launching a WooCommerce or similar store on a managed or unmanaged VPS. Typical needs:

• 1 public IPv4 for the VPS itself (web, email, SSH)
• IPv6 addresses for the same services for future‑proofing and performance on IPv6‑heavy networks
• Optional extra IPv4 if you run separate mail infrastructure or special whitelisting rules

Recommended approach:

• Use the default IPv4 allocated with your dchost.com VPS.
• Enable dual‑stack (A and AAAA records) for your main domain.
• Host all websites for that project on the same IPv4 using SNI, unless you have a specific compliance or legacy reason to separate them.

Scenario 2: Agency Hosting 30+ Client Sites

An agency manages dozens of client WordPress sites on a combination of reseller hosting and VPS servers. Historically, many agencies asked for dedicated IPs per client to “help SEO” or “look more professional.” Those justifications no longer hold for modern search engines or TLS.

What we typically recommend:

• Use shared IPs on reseller or multi‑site VPS platforms, grouping clients by project type or region.
• Reserve dedicated IPv4 for the very few cases where a partner or payment provider demands it in writing.
• Leverage dual‑stack hosting for better global performance instead of burning IPv4 on cosmetic separation.

Our guides on designing scalable hosting architectures for agencies and on technically comparing hosting providers using real‑world benchmarks can help you plan a stack that balances performance, cost and IPv4 conservation.

Scenario 3: SaaS Application with Many Tenants

A SaaS platform hosts hundreds or thousands of customer domains, either as subdomains (tenant.example.com) or custom domains (customer‑domain.com). Assigning a dedicated IPv4 per tenant would be financially impossible and operationally painful.

Instead, you can:

• Use a small pool of dual‑stack ingress endpoints (reverse proxies/load balancers).
• Terminate TLS with SNI and host all certificates on those limited IPs.
• Keep application nodes, databases and internal services on private IPv4 or IPv6‑only networking.

This architecture minimizes IPv4 usage to a small, scalable edge layer while giving every tenant a full‑featured HTTPS experience.

Scenario 4: Colocation with Your Own Routers

If you colocate your own hardware at dchost.com, you might either:

• Use IPv4 prefixes that we allocate and announce for you, or
• Bring your own PI space and ASN under RIPE/ARIN.

In both cases, you benefit from careful planning:

• Design address plans with aggregation in mind to simplify routing and filtering.
• Segment public and private address space clearly, and avoid leaking private ranges to the internet.
• Deploy IPv6 alongside IPv4 so you can gradually move new services to IPv6‑first.

This gives you long‑term flexibility while keeping your IPv4 footprint—and therefore exposure to future price surges—as small and controlled as possible.

Budgeting and Risk Management for the Next 3–5 Years

IPv4 exhaustion and price surges are not “this year’s news” that will disappear. They are structural changes to how the internet allocates addresses. That means your budgeting and risk planning should treat IPv4 as a scarce, strategic resource.

1. Treat IPv4 as a Capacity‑Planned Resource

Instead of adding IPs ad‑hoc, manage IPv4 like you manage CPU, RAM or disk:

• Estimate how many public IPv4 addresses your architecture truly needs.
• Track allocations by project, team, and purpose.
• Periodically review whether those allocations still make sense.

On our side, we do the same at the provider level: we forecast IPv4 needs per product line (shared, VPS, dedicated, colocation), so we can secure capacity ahead of time instead of reacting to shortages at the last minute.

2. Budget for Incremental Price Increases

Even if IPv4 transfer prices stabilise, many providers will gradually adjust their pricing to reflect the true cost of acquiring and managing addresses. In your 3–5 year cost projections, assume that:

• The “included” IPv4 per server remains stable, but
• Extra or specialty IPv4 allocations become more expensive over time.

The more you can architect around shared IPs, dual‑stack, and IPv6‑first designs, the more insulation you gain from future increases.

3. Reduce Coupling Between IP Addresses and Business Identity

Try to avoid tying your brand or service identity to raw IPs. Instead:

• Use DNS as the main “source of truth” for where services live.
• Rely on CNAMEs, load balancers and reverse proxies rather than telling partners to whitelist specific IPs whenever possible.
• Document any unavoidable IP‑based integrations so they can be renegotiated or migrated if addresses change.

This makes future IP renumbering or migration across servers, data centers, or even providers much less painful.

4. Plan an IPv6 Adoption Roadmap

You do not need to flip a switch overnight, but you do need a plan. A realistic roadmap might look like this:

1. Phase 1: Enable IPv6 on new VPS and dedicated servers, add AAAA records and test dual‑stack reachability.
2. Phase 2: Move internal services (APIs, caches, databases) to IPv6‑preferred or IPv6‑only segments where feasible.
3. Phase 3: Optimise monitoring, logging and security tooling for IPv6, so it feels as natural as IPv4.
4. Phase 4: Start new projects in IPv6‑first mode, falling back to IPv4 only where absolutely required.

We discuss broader strategy options—IPv6‑only vs dual‑stack and their impact on websites, email and SEO—in our guide on choosing between IPv6‑only and dual‑stack hosting for real‑world workloads.

Conclusion: Staying Ahead of IPv4 Costs Without Breaking Your Stack

IPv4 exhaustion and price surges are not a passing trend; they are the new normal. But that does not mean your hosting costs have to spiral out of control. By understanding how the IPv4 market works, where costs surface in hosting products, and which technical strategies make the biggest difference, you can turn a structural constraint into a manageable design parameter.

From our vantage point at dchost.com, the customers who cope best with rising IPv4 costs share a few habits: they treat IP addresses as capacity‑planned resources, adopt IPv6 and dual‑stack calmly but steadily, rely on SNI and shared IPs wherever possible, and keep a tidy house when it comes to unused allocations. If you are planning a new project, a migration, or a colocation deployment, our team can help you choose the right combination of shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and colocation—with an IP plan that fits both your technical needs and your budget.

If you want to dive further into the technical and market side, we recommend our deeper technical roadmap for IPv4 exhaustion and price dynamics and our analysis of IPv4 address prices hitting record levels. And whenever you are ready to review your own IP usage or design a future‑proof hosting architecture, you can reach out to us at dchost.com—we plan around IPv4 constraints every day, so you do not have to do it alone.