Ask HN: How do VPS providers issue dedicated IPv4 IPs?

2 points·octosphere··4 comments

Excuse me, I'm a bit of a networking newbie, but I heard from various sources that the IPV4 address space is exhausted. I went to create a new Digital Ocean VPS (Virtual Private Server) / 'droplet', and it gave me a dedicated IPV4 address. How are they able to do this if the address space is exhausted? Do they own particular subnets that they use specifically for their customers?

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AIUI "address space exhaustion" (the main event) refers to the depletion of IANA's /8 blocks. At the lower levels (/22-/24), companies stocked up on these, bought companies etc, now I think there are proper broker organisations.

Digital Ocean running out of IPv4 addresses to assign to VMs is down to many factors, only one of which is being unable to get an allocation from the RIR because the RIR can not get any more from IANA.

Exhaustion refers to allocation. For example, my company has several very large subnets (we're a UK ISP), that are entirely unused, as we bought them by the million when they were cheap back in the 90s.

We could sell smaller subnets (we often do...), or we could use them for things like VPS hosting. Digital Ocean will own several blocks/subnets, and allocate from those pools.

Yes, VPS providers own IP space for that (which is also why you sometimes can get VPS without IPv4 addresses for cheaper, since if you're running low obtaining new IPv4 addresses is becoming more and more expensive)

Yep. And, additional IPs cost like $1/month

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