5 ms·

What boggles my mind about cheap hosts is how the IP addresses still seem to keep flowing. I thought we were close to exhausting them, and it's certainly tricky

What boggles my mind about cheap hosts is how the IP addresses still seem to keep flowing. I thought we were close to exhausting them, and it's certainly tricky to get extra IPs on some hosts, yet you can pay relatively small sums to spin up VPSes all over the place, each with their own IP :-)

eli 12y ago
Is it actually hard to get extra IPs anywhere? Sometimes I've had to fill out a form or pay a $1/mo but I've never been declined. (I suppose I also always have a good reason.)
aroch 12y ago
If you fill out a LIR application for ARIN or RIPE you're probably going to get repurposed AFRINIC or APNIC IPv4 IPs (anywhere from 20 /25's to a /22 to a /16 ). Globally Ipv4 is pretty much exhausted (no large blocks) but some regions have more and there's a black/grey market for IPs that all the large hosts are part of.
- staunch 12y ago
  Has anyone written about this extensively?
  - aroch 12y ago
    On what, the IP blackmarket? I don't think so, but off the top of my head Microsoft (rather publicly) bought an entire /13 for several million a few years ago
    - staunch 12y ago
      Curious about the on-going IPv4 war in general I guess. Seems like there aren't many who have a good view of the situation though.
- Gormo 12y ago
  I think you're right. I set up a VPS last year with a provider based in Buffalo, NY, but for a few weeks, geolocators kept placing my IP in Indonesia. But there doesn't really seem to be anything untoward about moving IPs from areas of low demand to areas of high demand.
kijin 12y ago
I suspect that the amount of IP space the VPS market consumes is only a tiny fraction of the IP space that consumer devices consume nowadays. Although many of us programmers own multiple servers, we are only a tiny minority compared to the smartphone-toting population of the world. It has, though, become more difficult to get additional IPs than before. Linode used to hand out one additional IP per VPS on demand, but now they require a justification for all additional IPs.
- petercooper 12y ago
  I suspect that the amount of IP space the VPS market consumes is only a tiny fraction of the IP space that consumer devices consume nowadays. I agree, although consumer devices - especially mobiles - could be easily NATed by a provider, no? I'm not too savvy on the demands of mobile devices but I don't think incoming connections are a requirement for anything(?)
  - kijin 12y ago
    You're right, consumer devices could be easily NATed, and I've heard rumors that ISPs in some parts of the world actually do it. But it's notoriously difficult to set up NAT on a large scale without seriously impacting performance, so large ISPs in the developed world tend to avoid it.
- runeks 12y ago
  > Although many of us programmers own multiple servers, we are only a tiny minority compared to the smartphone-toting population of the world. It's worth noting, though, that smartphone users don't care whether their traffic is carried using IPv4 of IPv6, so you can slowly transition from one to the other without users noticing. 15% of T-Mobile's connections are IPv6: https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/464xlat-apricot-2014_1393236641.pdf https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/464xlat-apricot-2014_13... If you started only giving out IPv6 addresses to VPS customers, I don't think they would be as oblivious as the smartphone users.
illumen 12y ago
Yeah, good point. There's a lot of cheap VPS hosts which only do protocol 6. For many purposes, that is just fine.
cbhl 12y ago
One thing that caught me off guard is that these are IPv4-only; if you want IPv6 you have to use HE.net tunnels or similar. IPv6-only hosts I understand, but I can't imagine that you'd be able to get IPv4 addresses cheaply enough to maintain this pricing for long.

eli 12y ago

Is it actually hard to get extra IPs anywhere? Sometimes I've had to fill out a form or pay a $1/mo but I've never been declined. (I suppose I also always have a good reason.)

aroch 12y ago

If you fill out a LIR application for ARIN or RIPE you're probably going to get repurposed AFRINIC or APNIC IPv4 IPs (anywhere from 20 /25's to a /22 to a /16 ). Globally Ipv4 is pretty much exhausted (no large blocks) but some regions have more and there's a black/grey market for IPs that all the large hosts are part of.

staunch 12y ago
Has anyone written about this extensively?
- aroch 12y ago
  On what, the IP blackmarket? I don't think so, but off the top of my head Microsoft (rather publicly) bought an entire /13 for several million a few years ago
  - staunch 12y ago
    Curious about the on-going IPv4 war in general I guess. Seems like there aren't many who have a good view of the situation though.
Gormo 12y ago
I think you're right. I set up a VPS last year with a provider based in Buffalo, NY, but for a few weeks, geolocators kept placing my IP in Indonesia. But there doesn't really seem to be anything untoward about moving IPs from areas of low demand to areas of high demand.

kijin 12y ago

I suspect that the amount of IP space the VPS market consumes is only a tiny fraction of the IP space that consumer devices consume nowadays. Although many of us programmers own multiple servers, we are only a tiny minority compared to the smartphone-toting population of the world. It has, though, become more difficult to get additional IPs than before. Linode used to hand out one additional IP per VPS on demand, but now they require a justification for all additional IPs.

petercooper 12y ago
I suspect that the amount of IP space the VPS market consumes is only a tiny fraction of the IP space that consumer devices consume nowadays. I agree, although consumer devices - especially mobiles - could be easily NATed by a provider, no? I'm not too savvy on the demands of mobile devices but I don't think incoming connections are a requirement for anything(?)
- kijin 12y ago
  You're right, consumer devices could be easily NATed, and I've heard rumors that ISPs in some parts of the world actually do it. But it's notoriously difficult to set up NAT on a large scale without seriously impacting performance, so large ISPs in the developed world tend to avoid it.
runeks 12y ago
> Although many of us programmers own multiple servers, we are only a tiny minority compared to the smartphone-toting population of the world. It's worth noting, though, that smartphone users don't care whether their traffic is carried using IPv4 of IPv6, so you can slowly transition from one to the other without users noticing. 15% of T-Mobile's connections are IPv6: https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/464xlat-apricot-2014_1393236641.pdf https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/464xlat-apricot-2014_13... If you started only giving out IPv6 addresses to VPS customers, I don't think they would be as oblivious as the smartphone users.

illumen 12y ago

Yeah, good point. There's a lot of cheap VPS hosts which only do protocol 6. For many purposes, that is just fine.

cbhl 12y ago

One thing that caught me off guard is that these are IPv4-only; if you want IPv6 you have to use HE.net tunnels or similar. IPv6-only hosts I understand, but I can't imagine that you'd be able to get IPv4 addresses cheaply enough to maintain this pricing for long.