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IPv4 Exhaustion: Industry Leaders Give Their Opinion!

Every month, LowEndBox puts a question in front of hosting industry leaders and LEB community providers, who are invited to comment and offer their perspective.  Our goal is to stimulate discussion around important issues in the industry, inform our readership, and help other providers so the community as a whole benefits.  If you have a question you’d like to put to the round table, please submit it to us!

This month’s question:

As early as 2008, we were seeing doom-and-gloom articles about how the industry was almost out of IPv4addresses, yet here we are in 2021 and VPS prices with ipv4 are cheaper than ever.  What if any effect has ipv4address exhaustion had on your company?

 

 

Jay, CEO of NexusBytes

It has definitely been more of a concern from time to time. We continue to invest into acquiring IPv4 through direct source and brokers, in an effort to future proof ourself.

We have been very cautious when it comes to giving away IP and one of the many reason we focus on selling bigger plans instead of smaller one.

However, contrary to the popular belief, there’s still plenty of resources available across all the RIR that would eventually become available. There are companies with unused /8 blocked, that eventually would be revoked. Spam networks would eventually be forced to give up their allocation as well. At the same time, bigger players such as Amazon and Azure are also investing heavily and stocking up.

While IPv6 is the future, that future is quite far away.

 

Dustin Cisneros, CEO of RackNerd

I’ve always been a firm believer that there’s plenty of IPv4 space available in the market place (despite what the media/news portrays), and to this day, we have access to large amounts of IPv4 addresses like never before. While it is true that certain RIR’s have stopped issuing new allocations, there is also an abundance of aftermarket activity, as well as existing ISP’s who have IPv4 allocations that are unused. We leverage our upstream’s, and also cater to customers who are after diversity, and successfully do so. We also leverage partnerships and lease IPv4 through third parties. Our rates are aggressive on IPv4 as a result of our large scale and commitments that we’re able to take on, and as such, we’re able to extend these savings down to our customers.

Worldwide adoption for IPv6 will continue to be slow. Providers often times recognize this too, and help stimulate the IP economy by leasing out their excess IPv4 space, and/or providing their ranges at aggressive rates.

For those who are looking for dedicated servers with large IPv4 allocations, i.e. dedicated servers with /24, dedicated servers with 16x /28, or even dedicated servers with 32x /29 IPv4 allocations, RackNerd can accommodate both your diversity and IPv4 requirements at affordable prices! Take a look at RackNerd’s large IPv4 allocation dedicated servers.

 

Stacey Talieres, Director of Marketing, InterServer

The articles from 2008 did in fact predict the depletion of IPv4 allocations correctly. All regions such as APNIC, ARIN, AfriNIC and RIPE were exhausted by around 2011. Currently there are some hosting companies definitely sitting pretty on large amount of allocations. Other hosts followed the rules and requested only the appropriate amount needed. As of right now (April 2021) the cost per IP address is $28. As allocations are further depleted and hosts are forced to purchase IPv4 on the open market it will inevitably lead to the cost of a VPS to increase. On the flip side its quite possibly that the cost of a VPS with IPv6 ONLY could go down to offset the increase associated with IPv4. InterServer is considering offering a discount to customers that opt out of ipv4 when ordering a VPS.

 


Thank you to all of our providers for participating this month!

If you have a question you’d like to put to the round table, please submit it to us!

raindog308

3 Comments

  1. paul:

    “There are companies with unused /8 blocked, that eventually would be revoked.”
    Is there a plan to reclaim addresses from the large holders, like USPS, Ford, MIT?

    April 22, 2021 @ 9:52 am | Reply
    • From my perspective, they should eventually be pulled back if there’s no usage/justified usage case.

      April 22, 2021 @ 8:19 pm | Reply
  2. Jon:

    Thanks for this article.

    April 22, 2021 @ 11:37 am | Reply

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