IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges: What’s Happening and How to Adapt

The IPv4 pool is effectively sold out, yet the number of servers, SaaS platforms, ecommerce sites and internal services that need public IP addresses keeps growing. If you manage hosting, networks or online projects, you have already felt the impact: higher per‑IP fees, stricter justification rules and more discussions around whether every new service really needs its own dedicated IPv4. In this article, we will unpack what IPv4 exhaustion actually means in 2025, why prices have surged so aggressively, and how you can design your infrastructure so that these changes don’t blow up your hosting budget. We’ll look at real‑world patterns we see while operating VPS, dedicated and colocation environments at dchost.com, translate registry policies into practical steps, and outline concrete strategies to reduce your dependency on scarce IPv4 space without breaking compatibility or email deliverability.

How We Ran Out of IPv4 in Practice

The simple math behind IPv4 exhaustion

IPv4 addresses are 32‑bit numbers. In theory, that gives us about 4.3 billion addresses (2³²). On paper, that sounds huge. In real life, it never was:

• Large ranges were reserved for special uses (private networks, loopback, multicast, documentation).
• In the early days, enormous blocks were allocated to a small number of organizations that did not always use them efficiently.
• Address space is fragmented into smaller pieces (/24, /22, /20, and so on), making it harder to reassemble into contiguous ranges.

As the internet grew globally, five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) – ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC – kept allocating IPv4. Each region hit its “final /8” moment at different times, but the outcome was the same: no more large, easily available IPv4 pools.

From free allocation to a secondary transfer market

Once the free pools effectively ran out, a secondary market emerged. Organizations that held more IPv4 space than they truly needed started selling or leasing it to those who needed more. RIRs introduced transfer policies, listing requirements and needs‑based justifications, but one thing was unavoidable: scarcity gave IPv4 addresses a market price.

We’ve written separately about the details of this pricing trend in our article why IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs and what you can do about it, but the short version is straightforward: when the supply of new IPv4 is capped and demand continues to rise, prices climb – sometimes faster than your annual budget review cycle.

Why the problem didn’t disappear with IPv6

IPv6 was specifically designed to solve the shortage problem, yet we still talk about IPv4 exhaustion and price shocks. Why?

• Compatibility: A lot of the internet still runs on IPv4. Many networks and legacy systems are not IPv6‑ready.
• Application and tooling gaps: Some commercial software, monitoring tools and on‑prem appliances lag in IPv6 features.
• Operational risk: Teams hesitate to touch working production networks without a clear, low‑risk plan.
• Email and reputation: Many email filters, blocklists and reputation systems are still heavily tuned around IPv4.

Because of these realities, most companies deploy IPv6 as dual‑stack (IPv4 and IPv6 together), not as pure IPv6. That means IPv4 demand stays high, even as IPv6 adoption improves year over year.

Why IPv4 Prices Are Surging So Fast

Scarcity meets new waves of demand

Scarcity alone doesn’t explain the pace of recent price increases. The key driver is how quickly new demand keeps appearing:

• More online businesses: Every new store, SaaS product or internal API gateway demands reachability and often a dedicated IP.
• AI and data projects: New data platforms, model APIs and analytics stacks often spin up large fleets of servers that need routable addresses.
• Compliance and segmentation: Security teams increasingly segment environments (prod, staging, PCI, healthcare workloads), multiplying the number of ranges they want to keep isolated.
• Mergers and consolidation: When organizations merge, they don’t automatically free addresses – sometimes they need even more space to re‑architect safely.

Put simply, IPv4 usage is not just about “one IP per website” anymore. It’s one IP (or many) per environment, per entry point, per region and often per tenant.

Clean IP reputation carries a premium

Not all IPv4 addresses are equal. Ranges with a history of spam, phishing or abuse end up in blocklists and reputation databases. Cleaning that reputation can be time‑consuming or, in some cases, practically impossible.

As a result, clean IPv4 space with good mail and web reputation sells for more than “dirty” blocks with a messy history. Providers like us have to:

• Vet the ranges we bring into our network.
• Invest in abuse handling and proactive monitoring.
• Continuously work to keep IPs from landing on blocklists.

All these efforts add operational cost on top of the raw purchase or lease price of the IP addresses themselves.

Regional policies and transfer friction

RIRs have tightened IPv4 policies to prevent pure speculation and to keep allocations needs‑based. For example, ARIN’s transfer policies now come with specific documentation and validation requirements about how new space will be used. We’ve covered how these rules translate into real‑world engineering work in our article what DevOps teams must do now under updated ARIN IP transfer policies.

This oversight is good for the health of the global routing table, but it also introduces friction: background checks, legal reviews, route validation and renumbering planning. Every layer of complexity slows down transactions and pushes prices upward.

IPv4 leasing vs. buying: different pressures, same outcome

In today’s market, some organizations choose to buy IPv4 ranges, others prefer to lease. The trade‑offs look roughly like this:

• Buying IPv4: High upfront capital expense, long‑term stability, but subject to changing policies and the challenge of routing, RPKI, and management.
• Leasing IPv4: Lower upfront cost, more flexibility, but monthly expenses that can climb quickly with market rates.

Hosting providers often use a blend: some address blocks come from historic allocations, some from purchases and some from leases. Either way, the end result for customers is similar: the days of “free” IPv4 addresses bundled with every resource are gone. Public IPv4 has become a line item that must be planned and justified.

How IPv4 Costs Ripple Into Hosting, VPS and dedicated servers

Per‑IP fees are becoming the norm

In the early 2010s, it was common to receive several IPv4 addresses with a VPS or dedicated server without paying much attention. Today that model is rarely sustainable. The typical pattern we see is:

• Each server or VPS includes a single primary IPv4 address.
• Additional IPv4 addresses are available as a billed add‑on, sometimes with a limit per server or customer.
• Requests for larger blocks require justification (SSL needs, separate tenants, specific applications).

At dchost.com, we’ve shifted gradually to this more transparent model. It allows us to continue providing high‑quality IP space while keeping base hosting prices competitive for customers who don’t need many public IPv4 addresses.

Dedicated IPv4 for SSL is no longer necessary

One of the classic budget issues used to be “one IP per SSL certificate.” Before SNI (Server Name Indication) support became universal, you really did need a dedicated IPv4 address for each HTTPS site on a server.

Modern browsers and operating systems fully support SNI, so you can serve many SSL sites from a single IPv4 address. The only caveat is very old clients, which for most businesses are no longer worth designing around. If you still operate legacy or high‑risk workloads (like e‑commerce), our article on choosing between Let’s Encrypt and commercial SSL certificates explains how to balance compatibility and cost.

Practically, this means you can decommission a surprising number of “SSL‑only” IPv4 addresses just by consolidating onto SNI‑enabled stacks.

Segmented networks and compliance

Many customers separate production, staging, development and test into distinct network segments, sometimes even across regions. That’s a good practice, but it has an IPv4 cost:

• Multiple public entry points (e.g. separate IPs for admin portals, APIs and public websites).
• Different external ranges per region to simplify geolocation or compliance rules.
• Dedicated IPs for third‑party audits, PCI DSS zones or logging endpoints.

When IPv4 was cheap, this segmentation was “nice to have.” Now it must be done more deliberately. You may still want separate IPs for certain high‑sensitivity workloads, but a lot of cases can be covered with shared IPs and smarter routing or naming.

Case examples from day‑to‑day operations

Here are a few patterns we see regularly across customers:

• Small agency: Dozens of WordPress sites, all previously on their own IPv4. After consolidating onto a smaller number of shared IPs with SNI and a caching layer, they cut their monthly IP costs dramatically, without any SEO or uptime impact.
• SaaS platform: Initially launched with one dedicated IPv4 per customer instance for “simplicity.” Over time, this became untenable. By moving to a shared IP per region plus path‑based routing and per‑tenant SSL certificates, they freed up large chunks of space.
• Internal tools: Various monitoring panels and admin UIs had their own dedicated IPv4 addresses. Moving these behind VPN or private networks preserved security while eliminating public IP requirements.

The common theme: plenty of IPv4 usage is historical rather than strictly necessary with today’s tools and protocols.

Reducing Your Dependency on Expensive IPv4

Adopt IPv6 as a first‑class citizen

The most powerful long‑term lever is taking IPv6 seriously on your servers and applications. Dual‑stacking your infrastructure doesn’t immediately remove your IPv4 needs, but it starts shifting part of your traffic onto a protocol that is effectively inexhaustible for your use case.

If you’re running on VPS or dedicated servers, enabling IPv6 is usually a straightforward configuration step. We’ve published a detailed guide to IPv6 setup and configuration on a VPS server that walks through address assignment, firewall rules and basic testing.

Once IPv6 is available, you can:

• Publish AAAA records for your main domains and APIs.
• Gradually test IPv6‑only paths for internal services.
• Experiment with IPv6‑first CDN or load balancing strategies.

As more clients reach you over IPv6, the business pressure around IPv4 scarcity becomes less acute.

Use name‑based virtual hosting instead of IP‑per‑site

If you still allocate one IPv4 address per website or per small customer, this is usually the easiest place to save. Modern web servers and control panels are designed to host hundreds of domains on a single IP via the Host header and SNI.

To do this safely:

• Ensure your web server (Nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed, etc.) is configured for name‑based virtual hosts.
• Confirm SNI support for all HTTPS vhosts and certificates.
• Monitor logs and error reports carefully after consolidation.

If you’d like to optimise further at the web server level, our article on how hosting choices affect Core Web Vitals shows how you can improve performance while running many sites on shared IPs.

Move internal and admin services off public IPv4

A surprising proportion of public IPv4 addresses are consumed by services that never needed to be on the open internet:

• Database admin panels.
• Internal file sharing or dashboards.
• Monitoring and logging UIs.

Instead of dedicating public IPv4 to each of these, consider:

• Placing them behind VPN access (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN).
• Using private RFC1918 addresses inside a VPC or VLAN.
• Publishing them only via reverse proxy paths on a single IP, locked down with strong authentication.

This not only saves IPv4 but often improves your security posture by reducing the attack surface.

Embrace NAT where appropriate

Network Address Translation (NAT) is not new, but its role is evolving. When designed carefully, NAT can let thousands of internal services share a small pool of public IPv4 addresses while still being traceable and secure.

Some patterns that work well in practice:

• Outbound‑only NAT: Many internal microservices only need outbound internet access. They can share a single public IP for egress without exposing inbound ports.
• NAT with load balancers: Public IPv4 is used only on edge load balancers or reverse proxies, while the majority of services live behind private addressing.
• IPv6‑first with NAT64: In advanced setups, internal workloads run on IPv6‑only and use NAT64/DNS64 to reach IPv4‑only destinations, further reducing reliance on internal IPv4 pools.

If you are curious about IPv6‑first and IPv6‑only architectures, we’ve shared hands‑on experiences in our post about hosting a website on an IPv6‑only VPS with NAT64/DNS64.

Audit and reclaim unused or underused ranges

Before requesting more IPv4 space, it’s worth performing a careful audit of what you already have:

• Identify legacy addresses still routed but unused.
• Consolidate small, fragmented allocations into larger, more efficient ranges where possible.
• Remove one‑off allocations that can be replaced with name‑based hosting or internal private addresses.

A simple spreadsheet IPAM, or a more advanced IP address management tool, often reveals “low‑hanging fruit” – addresses that can be freed inside a week with minimal risk. This step alone can postpone expensive new allocations for months or years.

Planning Your IP Strategy for the Next 3–5 Years

Treat IPv4 as a scarce, shared resource

From a planning perspective, start treating IPv4 like any other constrained and shared infrastructure component, similar to limited rack space in a data center or a capped storage tier. That means:

• Forecasting your likely IPv4 growth per year (new projects, regions, tenants).
• Setting internal expectations that public IPv4 will be allocated only where it is truly needed.
• Documenting your addressing plans as part of your architecture and capacity reviews.

Our general guide on cutting hosting costs by right‑sizing VPS, bandwidth and storage uses a similar thinking style. Apply the same discipline to IP addressing and you will see fewer “surprise” charges.

Design for dual‑stack from day one

New projects should be dual‑stack by default:

• Every new public‑facing service gets IPv4 and IPv6.
• DNS records (A and AAAA) are created from the start.
• Monitoring, logging and WAF rules are all IPv6‑aware.

This makes later “IPv6 migration” a non‑event, because IPv6 is already part of how the service is built and observed. Over time, as IPv6 traffic share grows, you gain the option to introduce IPv6‑only internal layers, reducing your internal IPv4 footprint.

Align email strategy with IP scarcity

Email delivery often drives IP decisions: marketing, transactional and support mail all compete for clean IPv4 space. To align with scarcity:

• Separate bulk marketing from critical transactional mail at the IP or subdomain level.
• Harden authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and rDNS so you preserve your existing IP reputation.
• Monitor blocklists and complaint rates proactively.

Our in‑depth guide on SPF, DKIM, DMARC and rDNS for email deliverability walks through the concrete steps. Protecting your current IPv4 reputation is often cheaper and easier than acquiring new ranges.

Stay informed on industry and registry trends

IPv4 exhaustion is not a static event; registry policies, transfer rules and market prices continue to evolve. Keeping an eye on industry updates helps you time your decisions better:

• Policy changes can make transfers slower or faster.
• New security standards (like RPKI adoption) influence routing decisions and due diligence.
• Large scale IPv6 milestones can reduce pressure in specific regions or sectors.

On our side, we follow these developments closely and share what they mean in practice through our blog, including posts on IPv4 address prices hitting record highs and why IPv6 adoption is suddenly everywhere. Building your own internal “playbook” based on these trends will make executive conversations about IP budgets much easier.

What We’re Doing at dchost.com – and How You Can Move Forward Calmly

How we approach IPv4 inside our infrastructure

Running shared hosting, VPS, dedicated and colocation services means we feel IPv4 scarcity from multiple angles at once. Our approach includes:

• Transparent IP allocation: New servers include a baseline IPv4 allocation, with clearly documented options and pricing for additional addresses.
• Careful reputation management: Abuse monitoring, blocklist checks and strict policies around acceptable use to keep addresses clean.
• Consolidation where safe: Encouraging SNI and name‑based hosting for websites that don’t need dedicated IPs.
• Private networking: Leveraging private subnets and internal routing for many control plane and admin functions.

This is how we keep IPv4 available for workloads that genuinely need it (for example, certain email setups or specialised applications), while still offering competitive hosting options for more typical web and app projects.

IPv6‑first as the long‑term answer

At the same time, we believe the only sustainable way out of permanent IPv4 stress is serious IPv6 adoption. That’s why we:

• Offer IPv6 on VPS and dedicated servers and encourage customers to enable it early in a project’s lifecycle.
• Continuously test control panels, backup tools and monitoring systems in dual‑stack and IPv6‑only scenarios.
• Share practical IPv6 experiences and configurations in our blog to lower the barrier for your own team.

When you’re ready to move more aggressively, you can combine dual‑stack internet‑facing services with IPv6‑only internal layers, gradually reducing the amount of internal IPv4 you need to manage and secure.

Bringing it all together: a calm, practical game plan

IPv4 exhaustion and price surges are not going away. But they also don’t need to derail your hosting roadmap or infrastructure budget. The most resilient teams we work with share a similar playbook:

• They audit and reclaim wasted IPv4 before buying more.
• They consolidate websites and services onto shared IPs with SNI, reverse proxies and private networking.
• They enable IPv6 everywhere it’s supported and design new projects for dual‑stack from day one.
• They plan ahead for 3–5 years of IP growth instead of reacting project by project.

At dchost.com, we follow the same principles inside our own network, and we see how much calmer IPv4 conversations become once there’s a clear strategy instead of ad‑hoc requests. If you are evaluating new hosting, VPS, dedicated or colocation setups, treating IPv4 as a first‑class, scarce resource – instead of an afterthought – will put you ahead of most of the market.

From there, IPv6, smarter architecture and careful reputation management do the rest. The key is to start now, while you still have room to manoeuvre: review your current IP usage, enable IPv6 where you host today, and sketch your address plan for the next few years. The earlier you shift from “buy more IPv4” to “use IPv4 strategically,” the more predictable – and manageable – your hosting costs will be.