IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges: What’s Really Going On and How to Adapt

IPv4 addresses have quietly turned into one of the hottest commodities in the hosting world. If you manage infrastructure costs, run a SaaS platform, operate an agency, or even just resell hosting, you’ve probably noticed line items labeled “dedicated IPv4” creeping up every year. This is not random price gouging; it is the inevitable outcome of a simple fact: IPv4 space is finite, and the global internet has kept growing long after the original pool was exhausted. In this article, we’ll unpack why IPv4 exhaustion happened, what’s driving the ongoing price surge, and what you can realistically do about it without disrupting your applications or customers.

At dchost.com, we sit in the middle of this shift every day—buying upstream connectivity, planning data center capacity, and deciding how many IPv4 addresses we can reasonably make available with our hosting, VPS, dedicated server, and colocation services. We’ll share the economic and technical realities we see from the hosting side, and then translate them into a practical roadmap you can use: optimizing IPv4 usage, planning around market prices, and accelerating your move toward IPv6 in a calm, controlled way.

IPv4 as a Finite Resource: How We Got Here

The basics: Why IPv4 can run out

IPv4 addresses are 32-bit numbers. That means there are about 4.3 billion possible addresses (2³²). In the early days of the internet, nobody imagined that would be a problem. Large organizations received huge blocks (/8s, /16s) because address space felt endless. There was no cost pressure and no clear forecast of billions of smartphones, IoT devices, and always-on cloud services.

Over time, the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) like ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC took over allocation, trying to distribute IPv4 more efficiently. But they still had to work with a fixed-size pool. Once those last /8s were handed out, there would be no new IPv4 coming from IANA or the RIRs—only transfers and reclamation of existing space.

By the 2010s, each RIR had either run out of “free” IPv4 or entered a strict final policy phase. The global internet, however, kept growing explosively. That mismatch between a fixed supply and growing demand is the root of the IPv4 exhaustion and price surge story.

RIR run-out, waiting lists, and transfer markets

Once RIRs exhausted their general IPv4 pools, two things happened:

• Waiting lists and tiny final allocations: New entrants could only receive very small allocations under strict policies, often after long waiting periods.
• Emergence of transfer markets: Organizations with unused address space began selling or leasing their blocks to those who needed them.

Today, if you want a sizable contiguous IPv4 block, you usually get it by buying or leasing from someone else, following policies such as the updated rules we covered in our deep dive on ARIN IP transfer policies and what DevOps teams must do in 2025. That shift fundamentally changed IPv4 from an allocation question into a market pricing problem.

Why IPv4 Prices Are Surging (and Likely Won’t Drop Soon)

Supply is fixed, demand keeps growing

Once you accept that the global IPv4 pool is essentially fixed, the economics become straightforward:

• No new supply: There are no fresh IPv4 blocks being minted. The only supply is what already exists.
• Growing digitalization: More businesses move online, more SaaS products launch, more devices get connected, and more services need unique IPs (for SSL, email reputation, whitelisting, etc.).
• Slow IPv6 adoption: While IPv6 is growing, many networks, apps, and tools are still not fully comfortable with IPv6-only operation, which keeps IPv4 demand high.

Put these together and you get a classic case of fixed supply vs. rising demand, which inevitably pushes IPv4 prices upward. We’ve already discussed the record highs in our article on why IPv4 address prices are hitting record highs, and market data since then has mostly reinforced the trend.

Who’s buying IPv4—and why that affects your invoice

The buyers in IPv4 transfer markets are not just small hosting providers; they include:

• Large content and SaaS platforms that need clean address space for email deliverability, API endpoints, and customer segregation.
• ISPs and access providers that still rely on IPv4 for customer connections, often using techniques like carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) but still needing some public space.
• Enterprise networks that want to avoid major redesigns or just-in-time IPv6 migrations.

When these players buy or lease large blocks, it sets a reference price for the market. That price trickles down through upstream providers and eventually shows up in hosting, VPS, and dedicated server IPv4 add-on pricing. As a provider, we at dchost.com have to factor the acquisition cost, routing, and operational overhead of IPv4 into our pricing models.

Clean vs. dirty IP space: Reputation has a price

Not all IPv4 addresses are equal. Some ranges have:

• A history of spam or abuse, making them appear on blocklists.
• Past association with DDoS traffic or malware, flagged in security feeds.
• Long-standing good reputation with minimal abuse history.

Cleaning up a “dirty” range is costly and time-consuming, especially for email. We’ve shared practical steps for restoring email sender reputation and safely warming up IP space, and the reality is: doing this at scale requires serious effort.

That’s why “clean” IPv4 ranges with good reputation command a premium. If you run transactional email, marketing campaigns, or critical APIs, that premium can be worth it—but it still ultimately lands in someone’s budget.

How IPv4 Exhaustion Impacts Hosting, SaaS, and Enterprises

More careful assignment policies

Ten years ago it was common to assign multiple dedicated IPv4 addresses per small VPS “just in case.” Those days are gone. Today, responsible providers are forced to:

• Assign one IPv4 per service or customer only where technically necessary (SSL, specific routing, email separation).
• Encourage or require use of SNI-based HTTPS, so multiple domains can share a single IP securely.
• Review and reclaim unused or abandoned IPs far more aggressively.

At dchost.com, we periodically audit allocations across hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers to ensure IPv4 is used where it delivers real value. That keeps costs saner for everyone, including you.

Higher costs for certain use cases

Some scenarios are especially exposed to IPv4 price increases:

• Large multi-tenant SaaS platforms that want a dedicated IP for each tenant (for branding, email reputation, or firewall whitelisting).
• Bulk outbound email where multiple /24s are needed to manage reputation and warm-up.
• Legacy applications that assume one IPv4 per instance, with no support for virtual hosting or SNI.
• VPN and remote access services promising dedicated IPs to end users.

In these designs, IPv4 is not just a network detail; it becomes a core cost driver. When we do capacity planning with customers for large-scale SaaS or e-commerce deployments on our VPS and dedicated platforms, we now explicitly model “IP cost per tenant or per node” alongside CPU, RAM, and storage.

Operational headaches: blocklists, multihoming, and compliance

IPv4 scarcity also amplifies some operational risks:

• Blocklist incidents can be more painful when spare clean IPv4 space is limited.
• Multihoming and BGP design may require more careful use of IP ranges to avoid fragmentation and higher routing costs.
• Regulatory and contractual requirements (for example, certain financial or government integrations) sometimes still hardcode IPv4 expectations.

We’ve seen cases where a customer’s application theoretically supports IPv6, but critical upstream partners are IPv4-only or use IP-based ACLs that assume IPv4. In those scenarios, IPv6 alone isn’t enough; you still need strategic IPv4 capacity, even as you modernize the rest of the stack.

Practical Strategies to Stretch, Reclaim, and Reuse IPv4

1. Audit and reclaim unused IPv4 inside your own network

Before worrying about global markets, start with your own allocations. Some quick wins:

• Inventory all public IPv4 usage: Map which servers, load balancers, and services are using each address.
• Turn off vanity usage: Remove per-domain dedicated IPs that exist only for historical reasons or outdated SSL requirements.
• Decommission stale resources: Old staging environments, forgotten VMs, or retired applications often still hold on to IPs.

We regularly help customers on our VPS and dedicated platforms go through this exercise. A surprising amount of IPv4 can be freed by cleaning up old assumptions.

2. Use name-based virtual hosting and SNI everywhere you can

Modern web servers and browsers support Server Name Indication (SNI), which allows many HTTPS sites to share a single IPv4 address. This means you usually do not need a dedicated IP for each TLS-enabled domain. On a shared hosting or VPS environment, it’s common to host dozens or even hundreds of domains behind the same IPv4 using SNI.

If your architecture still defaults to “one domain, one IP,” it’s time to revisit that assumption. The same applies when you design reverse proxies, load balancers, and microservices ingress: use hostnames and SNI-based routing instead of tying each service to its own IPv4.

3. Segment with ports, not IPs, when appropriate

In development or internal environments, you can often segment services by port numbers instead of IP addresses. For example, on a dedicated server or powerful VPS, you might run:

• HTTPS for the main application on port 443
• Admin or API endpoints on ports like 8443 or 9443, protected behind VPN or IP allowlists
• Different internal microservices exposed on distinct ports, but all routed via a reverse proxy on a single IP

This approach won’t solve every problem, but it helps reduce the tendency to request extra IPv4 addresses simply for “clean separation” where hostnames and ports would work just as well.

4. Design carefully when you do need many IPv4 addresses

Some use cases truly need significant IPv4 space. If you’re in that situation, design carefully:

• Use contiguous blocks where possible to simplify routing and reduce BGP table fragmentation.
• Plan for reputation management if email is involved, including warm-up strategies and monitoring (our playbooks on SPF, DKIM, DMARC and rDNS and SRS/ARC for email forwarding are good starting points).
• Use internal RFC1918 space + NAT where public IPs are not strictly required.

When we architect large environments on dchost.com dedicated servers or colocation, we treat IPv4 planning as seriously as CPU and storage sizing. The cost of getting it wrong accumulates quietly over years.

The Real Exit Strategy: Gradual, Thoughtful IPv6 Adoption

IPv6 will not magically make IPv4 free—but it changes the trajectory

It’s tempting to think, “Once everyone moves to IPv6, IPv4 will be cheap again.” In practice, that’s unlikely. IPv4 will probably remain scarce and valuable for specific use cases (legacy systems, specialized integrations, and long-tail compatibility) for a long time.

However, every workload you successfully move to IPv6-first or dual-stack reduces your direct dependence on new IPv4 allocations. That’s the real benefit: you stop adding pressure on your own IPv4 budget and gain more flexibility in how you use the addresses you already have.

We’ve written extensively about this journey, including how to accelerate IPv6 adoption without breaking things and a practical dual-stack playbook for AAAA records and real-world tests. The pattern is consistent: careful, incremental steps work far better than “big bang” migrations.

Start with easy wins: web and APIs

The lowest-friction place to begin is usually public-facing web and API endpoints:

• Ensure your hosting, VPS, or dedicated server supports IPv6 on the network level.
• Enable IPv6 in your web server or reverse proxy (Nginx, Apache, etc.).
• Add AAAA records in DNS alongside your existing A records.
• Test from different networks and monitoring locations to verify reachability.

With proper configuration, your site will become dual-stack: reachable over both IPv4 and IPv6. Clients that support IPv6 (many mobile operators, modern ISPs, and corporate networks) will often prefer IPv6 automatically. Over time, this reduces the share of traffic that depends on your IPv4 routing and bandwidth.

Prepare your email stack for IPv6

Email has more moving parts, but IPv6 is slowly becoming unavoidable there too. When you’re ready, you’ll need to think about:

• AAAA records and PTR for your mail servers
• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies that consider IPv6
• Blocklists, reputation signals, and relay configurations

We’ve covered this in our dedicated guide, Email deliverability over IPv6: PTR, HELO, SPF and blocklists. The key point is that you can phase in IPv6 for email while keeping IPv4 in place, learning the quirks without risking a complete outage of your mail flow.

Experiment with IPv6-only in controlled scenarios

Once you’re comfortable with dual-stack, you can experiment with IPv6-only nodes behind translation layers (NAT64/DNS64) or IPv4 reverse proxies. That’s especially attractive for:

• Internal microservices
• New greenfield applications
• Lab and staging environments

If you’re curious about this model, our real-world story on running a website on an IPv6-only VPS with NAT64/DNS64 bridges to IPv4 walks through the architecture and trade-offs. Every workload you can safely move to IPv6-only is one less claim on your scarce IPv4 pool.

How We Approach IPv4 and IPv6 at dchost.com

Balancing cost, flexibility, and stability

From our side as a hosting provider, IPv4 exhaustion and rising prices shape how we design and price our services:

• We treat IPv4 as a scarce, premium resource and assign it where it actually matters for customers.
• We offer IPv6 support across hosting, VPS, dedicated server and colocation services, encouraging dual-stack setups.
• We continuously monitor market prices and RIR policies so that our long-term IPv4 planning stays sustainable.

Our goal is to ensure that when you choose dchost.com for your infrastructure, you get a stable, predictable environment where IPv4 is available when you truly need it—and IPv6 is ready for you the moment you’re prepared to take advantage of it.

Helping you plan around IPv4 and IPv6 in real projects

In capacity planning sessions with customers, we now always include an “IP layer” in the conversation:

• How many public IPv4 addresses do you truly need for launch vs. future scaling?
• Which services can go dual-stack today with minimal code changes?
• Where could we start IPv6-only experiments safely (internal APIs, staging, batch workers)?

This is the same mindset we bring when we talk about rising IPv6 adoption worldwide and what it means for your site or about other infrastructure shifts like data center expansion and AI workloads. The common thread is simple: plan early, move gradually, and avoid surprises.

Conclusion: IPv4 Won’t Get Cheaper, But Your Strategy Can Get Smarter

IPv4 exhaustion is not a theoretical future problem; it is already baked into the way hosting, networking, and SaaS economics work today. The record-high IPv4 prices you see on invoices are a symptom of a deeper reality: a fixed pool of addresses shared by a constantly growing internet. That pressure will not vanish, even as IPv6 adoption continues to rise.

The good news is that you have more control than it might seem. By auditing and reclaiming unused IPv4, designing with SNI and hostnames instead of “one IP per domain,” and adopting dual-stack and IPv6-only patterns where appropriate, you can slow down your IPv4 demand curve dramatically. Over the next few years, that will matter more than trying to “time” the market for a cheaper deal that may never come.

As the dchost.com team, we’re already integrating these principles into our hosting, VPS, dedicated server and colocation services. If you’re planning a new project or re-architecting an existing platform and want to sanity-check your IPv4/IPv6 strategy, reach out and we’ll be happy to walk through options with you. The goal is simple: keep your infrastructure fast, reliable, and secure—while staying ahead of the quiet but very real IPv4 price surge.