Industry & Technology
There Is No More New IPv4 Space
The pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses has been effectively exhausted at the regional registry level for years. RIPE NCC, which allocates addresses across Europe, has been distributing IPv4 space from a final small reserved pool since 2019, allocating only /24 blocks to new entrants on a waiting-list basis. The other regional registries reached similar exhaustion earlier in the decade.
What This Means in Practice
New IPv4 addresses are no longer handed out freely by registries — they are transferred between existing holders, usually at a market price. This scarcity is the direct reason IPv4 leasing markets and "IPv4 as a service" offerings have grown: providers holding legacy address blocks have an economic incentive to allocate them carefully rather than hand one out per server by default.
Why Some Providers Now Charge Extra for a Dedicated IPv4
Because each address has a real, ongoing cost, many hosting providers have shifted toward IPv4 add-on pricing, shared or NATed addresses by default, or IPv6-only entry tiers. This is a rational response to scarcity, but it changes what a customer needs to check before ordering: is a dedicated IPv4 included, or an extra line item?
Why a Dedicated Address Still Matters
- Outbound mail: sender reputation is tied to an IP address; a shared address means sharing someone else's reputation, good or bad
- Custom rDNS/PTR records: these are set per IP address, and require exclusive control of that address
- SSL/TLS with older clients: SNI has mostly solved this, but some legacy integrations still expect one certificate per IP
- Firewall rules scoped to a specific server rather than a shared pool
What This Means for Choosing a VPS
In a market where dedicated IPv4 is increasingly an upsell, it is worth checking explicitly whether a plan includes one by default rather than assuming it does. Every VPS For Life plan ships with a dedicated IPv4 address as a standard, included feature — not an add-on.
See dedicated IPv4 VPS plans →
Published by VPS For Life News Desk
