IPv4 Exhaustion and Price Surges: What’s Really Happening Behind the Scenes

IPv4 addresses used to be something you barely thought about when planning a new server or hosting project. You ordered a VPS, dedicated server or colocation setup, it came with one or a few IPv4s, and that was it. Today, IPv4 has turned into a scarce and rapidly appreciating resource. Prices rise every year, providers change their allocation policies, and suddenly “How many IPs do we really need?” becomes a business question, not just a network one. In this article, we’ll unpack why IPv4 exhaustion is no longer a theoretical problem, how it translates into real-world price surges, and what you can do in your infrastructure planning to stay ahead of it. We’ll keep the focus practical: capacity planning, IPv6 adoption, realistic mitigation strategies and how we at dchost.com think about IP allocation so you can keep your network both scalable and cost‑controlled.

What IPv4 Exhaustion Actually Means in 2025

The phrase “IPv4 is exhausted” gets thrown around a lot, but in practice it doesn’t mean “there are zero addresses left anywhere.” Instead, it means the regional internet registries (RIRs) that manage global allocations have largely handed out all easily assignable blocks. New large allocations are heavily restricted, waiting lists are common, and most of the remaining address movement happens on secondary transfer markets between organizations.

From RIR pools to secondary markets

Historically, providers requested IPv4 space directly from RIRs like RIPE NCC, ARIN, APNIC and were charged modest recurring fees. As those free pools were depleted, a new reality emerged:

• New IPv4 space usually comes via transfers (buying or leasing space from another organization).
• Per‑IP prices are driven by supply and demand rather than simple registry fee schedules.
• Contracts are more complex, with legal due diligence, blacklisting checks and routing considerations.

By the time an IP reaches your VPS, dedicated server or colocation environment, multiple layers of cost and operational overhead have stacked up. That’s the core reason price pressure keeps building.

Why exhaustion didn’t hurt immediately

Even after the official exhaustion dates, many providers still had internal reserves. For several years, these internal pools buffered the market. You may have noticed only small IPv4 price increases: a couple of dollars more per month per IP, a one‑time setup fee here and there. But as those reserves shrank, more providers needed to join the transfer market. At that point, competition for “clean” address space intensified and prices started climbing much faster.

We’ve covered the policy side in detail in our article on ARIN IP allocation changes and what they mean for your hosting and network. Here we’ll focus more on how those macro changes flow down into your actual hosting bills and architecture decisions.

What’s Driving IPv4 Price Surges?

IPv4 prices aren’t rising just because we ran out on paper. Several concurrent forces are pushing the per‑address cost higher, especially for blocks that are clean, well‑routed and suitable for production workloads or email sending.

1. Simple supply vs. exploding demand

On the supply side, there is a fixed global pool of IPv4 addresses. A portion of that is poorly routed, blacklisted or locked in legacy allocations that are not actively traded. On the demand side, several trends are all positive and growing:

• More services per organization: staging, QA, canary deployments, monitoring, separate email relays, API gateways, microservices.
• More devices and edge presence: IoT, remote branches, POPs, anycast deployments.
• Rapid growth of SaaS and e‑commerce platforms that need additional IPs for segmentation, reputation management or regionalization.

When a fixed, shrinking tradeable pool meets expanding demand, the only direction for prices is up.

2. Clean IP space is a premium segment

Not all IPv4 addresses are equal. Blocks that have a history of spam, abuse or routing issues require remediation and may still never behave perfectly for email or reputation‑sensitive workloads. As a result, there is a premium market for “clean” IP ranges with:

• Good reputation on major blocklists
• No history of large‑scale abuse
• Stable routing and consistent geolocation

These blocks command significantly higher prices than “random” space. If you run email, payment systems or compliance‑sensitive services, you will feel this premium directly or indirectly. For a deeper dive into how IP reputation and deliverability interact, our guide on SPF, DKIM, DMARC and rDNS for email deliverability is a good companion read.

3. Compliance, security and segmentation

Modern compliance regimes (PCI‑DSS, GDPR/KVKK, sectoral regulations) and security best practices have nudged organizations toward stronger network segmentation. Instead of one flat /24 for everything, teams now prefer to isolate:

• Public web frontends
• Admin panels and VPN endpoints
• Email infrastructure
• Third‑party integrations and APIs

This is good for security, but it increases the total IPv4 footprint per project. When multiplied across many tenants or clients on a hosting platform, the aggregate demand becomes significant.

4. Rising operational cost in the background

Each IPv4 address is not just a number in a database. There is a cost to:

• Routing and announcing prefixes globally
• Monitoring abuse and responding to incidents
• Maintaining accurate whois / registry records
• Keeping geolocation and RPKI information up to date

As global routing and security expectations rise (RPKI, ROA, better DDoS defenses), the operational overhead per IP block also increases. Providers recoup part of this via recurring per‑IP charges.

How IPv4 Price Surges Hit Your Hosting and Network Plans

If you only run a single small website, you might barely notice the change. But as soon as you manage multiple services, clients or more complex architectures, IPv4 economics start to matter.

Per‑IP charges on VPS and dedicated servers

Most hosting products now differentiate clearly between:

• Base service price: CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth.
• IPv4 allocation: typically 1 IP included, more at an extra monthly fee.

On a VPS, that may look like: one IPv4 included, each additional IPv4 billed per month. On dedicated servers or colocation, you might see small /29, /28 or /27 subnets priced separately from the hardware or rack space. Over a multi‑year period, these recurring IP fees can become a meaningful line item, especially if IP allocation was historically “loose.”

“Hidden” IP usage in your architecture

When we review customer setups at dchost.com, we often find that IPv4 usage has grown organically over time:

• Every environment (dev, staging, production) got its own set of IPs.
• Old IPs assigned to retired services were never reclaimed.
• Testing projects were given dedicated addresses and later forgotten.
• Separate mail servers were kept around even after moving email to another platform.

During a capacity or cost review, this can be a pleasant surprise: reclaiming and consolidating IPv4 space is often one of the quickest ways to control hosting costs without touching performance. If you’d like a broader view on where infrastructure waste often hides, our article on cutting hosting costs by right‑sizing VPS, bandwidth and storage is a good next step.

Impact on agencies and resellers

Agencies, resellers and SaaS providers hosting dozens of client sites feel IPv4 pressure most acutely. Many older setups followed the pattern “one dedicated IPv4 per client” for branding, SSL or email reasons. With modern SNI‑based SSL and careful email architecture, that pattern is rarely necessary today. But if you never revisited your design, you might now be carrying a large, expensive IP footprint that no longer delivers proportional value.

In our work with agencies, we often combine IP optimization with broader hosting architecture reviews. If you manage many sites on one stack, you may find our guide on hosting architecture for agencies managing 20+ WordPress sites particularly useful.

IPv6: The Only Real Long‑Term Exit From IPv4 Pressure

There is no realistic scenario where the world “finds more IPv4.” Transfer markets can shuffle addresses around, but they can’t increase the total pool. The only sustainable way out is widespread IPv6 adoption, with IPv4 gradually demoted from “primary connectivity” to “compatibility layer.”

What IPv6 changes in practice

IPv6 provides a vastly larger address space. Even a single /64 gives enough addresses for unimaginably large deployments, and typical allocations are /48 or similar. The result:

• You can give every server, container or VM its own global address.
• Network design can be cleaner, with less NAT complexity.
• The marginal cost of additional IPv6 addresses is effectively zero.

This doesn’t immediately remove the need for IPv4. Many users, networks and services still rely on IPv4, so dual‑stack (IPv4 + IPv6) remains the realistic standard for production hosting. But every percentage point of traffic that successfully uses IPv6 reduces pressure on scarce IPv4 resources.

Why IPv6 adoption has accelerated recently

In the last few years we’ve seen a clear shift. Major access networks, CDNs and content platforms have embraced IPv6 as a default. This has a strong network effect: once enough major endpoints support IPv6, it becomes low‑risk and high‑benefit for everyone else to join.

We’ve explored this in more depth in our article on accelerating IPv6 adoption and how to plan the transition. The short version: the earlier you adopt IPv6, the more freedom you regain in how you use and pay for IPv4.

Practical IPv6 steps on VPS and dedicated servers

At dchost.com we encourage all new VPS and dedicated deployments to enable IPv6 from day one. In practice, a sensible playbook looks like this:

1. Request IPv6 ranges alongside your IPv4 allocation.
2. Configure dual‑stack (A + AAAA DNS records) for your primary domains.
3. Test application behavior over IPv6 in staging (web, API, emails to IPv6‑capable destinations).
4. Monitor traffic ratios (what percentage of users connect over IPv6).

If you’re looking for a step‑by‑step technical guide, our article on IPv6 setup and configuration on your VPS server walks through the actual commands and configuration files.

Technical Strategies to Use IPv4 More Efficiently

Even with IPv6, you’ll likely need IPv4 for many years. The goal is not to eliminate IPv4 overnight, but to use it in a more deliberate, efficient way. Here are the strategies we most often recommend and implement.

1. Centralize services behind shared IPv4 endpoints

Many protocols allow you to serve multiple applications from a single IPv4 address by using different ports, hostnames or paths. Examples:

• Web hosting: multiple sites on one IP using virtual hosts and SNI‑based SSL.
• APIs and microservices: exposed behind one or a few reverse proxies with path‑based routing.
• Admin tools: grouped behind a VPN or jump host instead of each having its own public IP.

This doesn’t mean “cram everything into one server.” You can still separate backend services onto private networks and expose only frontends on precious IPv4 endpoints.

2. Use private networks where possible

Inside a datacenter or within your own multi‑server setup, there’s rarely a need for every node to have its own public IPv4 address. A common pattern we use at dchost.com is:

• One or a few public gateway / reverse proxy servers with IPv4/IPv6.
• Application servers, databases, cache nodes on private RFC1918 space (10.x, 192.168.x).
• Optional IPv6‑only internal communication between some components.

This approach reduces your public IPv4 footprint while keeping performance and isolation. It also plays nicely with high‑availability patterns like load balancers or anycast.

3. NAT and CGNAT with care

Network Address Translation (NAT) has been the workhorse of IPv4 conservation for decades. Carrier‑Grade NAT (CGNAT) extends the idea, allowing many customers to share a smaller pool of public addresses. While NAT is sometimes unavoidable, you should understand its trade‑offs:

• Debugging can be harder because many internal nodes share the same external IP.
• Some protocols and applications behave poorly behind aggressive NAT.
• Rate limiting or security lists based on IP addresses become less precise.

We generally recommend using NAT for outbound‑only or low‑risk traffic (e.g. background API calls) and reserving dedicated IPv4 for public‑facing services or anything that needs stable reputation (like email).

4. Reclaim and rotate unused IPs regularly

One of the simplest and most effective tactics is also the least glamorous: audit your existing IPv4 usage. Every few months, ask:

• Which IPs map to services that are no longer in use?
• Are there test or staging IPs that can be moved behind shared endpoints?
• Do we still need legacy IPs for services we migrated elsewhere?

At dchost.com we see many customers recover 10–30% of their IPv4 allocation through such clean‑ups, which translates directly into lower recurring costs and more headroom for future growth.

5. IPv6‑first for new features and internal tools

With modern operating systems and browsers, IPv6‑first is increasingly viable for internal dashboards, APIs, staging environments or developer tools. By making IPv6 the default for new services, you avoid automatically burning IPv4 for every experiment or microservice. Over a few years, this dramatically changes the shape of your IP usage.

Budgeting and Planning for a World of Expensive IPv4

Even with all the right technical strategies, you still need to plan financially for IPv4 becoming a more valuable asset. There are a few practical steps we recommend to our customers when revisiting their 1–3 year infrastructure roadmap.

1. Separate “server cost” from “IP cost” in your thinking

In many organizations, IPs are mentally bundled into “the server cost.” As long as that’s true, it’s hard to see which decisions are really driving the budget. We suggest tracking at least three components:

• Compute: CPU, RAM, main storage (VPS, dedicated, or colocation hardware).
• Network transit: bandwidth, traffic tiers, peering.
• IP addresses: number and type of IPv4s assigned.

Once you have separate numbers, you can make smarter trade‑offs. For example, you might realize you can afford a slightly larger VPS if you reduce your IPv4 count by consolidating frontends.

2. Build IPv4 assumptions into new project designs

When designing a new e‑commerce platform, SaaS product or internal tool, add IP usage to your architecture checklist:

• How many public IPv4s do we really need on day one?
• Can we share frontends, use private networks or go IPv6‑only for some components?
• Do we have a growth model that estimates how many additional IPs we’ll need at 2x or 5x load?

This is the same type of forward planning you already do for CPU, RAM and storage. Treat IPv4 as a finite, appreciating resource and design around that constraint.

3. Revisit “one IP per client” policies

If you’re an agency, reseller or platform provider, it’s worth systematically reviewing any policy that automatically assigns a dedicated IPv4 per customer. Many of the past reasons for this (legacy SSL, simplistic email setups) are no longer valid with modern tooling. Migrating some clients to shared IPv4 frontends—while retaining dedicated IPs for those who truly need them—can free up significant space.

4. Align IP strategy with your risk and compliance posture

Some organizations truly need more network isolation for compliance or risk reasons. For example, you might want payment processing nodes on separate subnets, or dedicated IPs for high‑value APIs. That’s fine—but document those requirements explicitly. When you can distinguish “must have separate IP for compliance” from “we’ve just always done it that way,” you can protect critical use cases while optimizing the rest.

How We Approach IPv4 and IPv6 at dchost.com

As a hosting provider offering domains, shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and colocation, we live in the middle of the IPv4 exhaustion story every day. Our goal is to shield you from chaos, not from reality: we can’t change global IPv4 economics, but we can help you design smarter around them.

Transparent, usage‑based IPv4 allocation

We prefer clear, predictable IPv4 policies: baseline allocations suitable for typical use cases, with additional IPs available on a documented pricing model. This helps you:

• See the real marginal cost of adding more IPv4s.
• Justify IP usage internally when you truly need more.
• Spot opportunities to consolidate underused addresses.

When customers come to us with large or growing IPv4 needs, we’re happy to sit down and review their architecture together to see where optimization or IPv6‑first strategies can reduce future pressure.

IPv6‑ready infrastructure by default

We treat IPv6 as a first‑class citizen across our platforms. That means:

• VPS and dedicated servers can be provisioned with IPv6 from day one.
• Our network and routing policies are designed for dual‑stack.
• We actively encourage (and help with) AAAA records, IPv6 firewall rules and monitoring.

If you’re curious about what an IPv6‑heavy future might feel like in practice, our deep‑dive story on running a website on an IPv6‑only VPS with NAT64/DNS64 bridges offers a nice preview.

Architecture help, not just raw resources

Where IPv4 really hurts is in poorly planned growth: individual decisions that made sense at the time, but combine into a fragile, expensive network. Part of our role at dchost.com is helping you avoid that. Whether you’re planning a multi‑tenant SaaS, an agency stack, or an e‑commerce platform preparing for heavy campaigns, we can:

• Review your current IP allocation and find quick wins.
• Propose dual‑stack and private networking designs.
• Help you size VPS, dedicated or colocation setups in a way that respects both performance and IPv4 scarcity.

Bringing It All Together: A Realistic Way Forward

IPv4 exhaustion and price surges are not going away. The global pool is finite, and every year more organizations join the secondary market for usable space. But this doesn’t have to translate into unpredictable hosting bills or architectural dead‑ends. The key is to treat IPv4 as the scarce resource it has become—plan it, budget it, and use it intentionally.

In practical terms, that means a few clear steps: understand how many IPv4s you’re actually using and why; consolidate services behind shared frontends where it’s safe to do so; reclaim addresses from retired projects; and start taking IPv6 seriously, not as a future experiment but as a routine part of new deployments. Combined, these measures can turn IP costs from an unpleasant surprise into a manageable, forecastable component of your infrastructure.

At dchost.com, we build our hosting, VPS, dedicated server and colocation services with this new reality in mind. If you’re looking at your current IP usage and wondering how to adapt, we’re happy to help you map out a calm, realistic roadmap—whether that’s a modest IPv6 rollout, a redesign of your agency stack, or a full review of your existing IP allocations. Reach out to our team, and let’s make sure IPv4 scarcity shapes your strategy in a thoughtful way, not in a crisis‑driven one.