IPv4 address cost in 2026: how IPv6 cuts your VPS bill

By ColossusCloud's Team

March 7, 2026

The IPv4 address cost on the open market has quietly become one of the biggest hidden expenses in hosting. A single IPv4 address trades for $30 to $50, and prices keep climbing. If you’re running multiple servers, spinning up microservices, or adding extra IPs to a single VPS, that cost compounds fast.

IPv6 eliminates this expense. An IPv6 address costs nothing. Every ColossusCloud VPS comes with a full /64 IPv6 subnet (18 quintillion addresses) at no extra charge.

Why the IPv4 address cost keeps rising

The internet ran out of IPv4 addresses years ago. ARIN (the American regional internet registry) gave out its last free block in 2015. APNIC did the same. Since then, IPv4 addresses have been bought and sold on a secondary market like any other scarce asset.

Price history tells the story:

  • 2017: ~$10 per IPv4 address
  • 2020: $20-25
  • 2024: $50+
  • 2026: $40-50 sustained, with spikes higher

Large /24 blocks (256 addresses) now sell for $12,000 or more. Hosting providers have to recoup those costs. That’s why “extra IPv4 address” is a paid add-on at most hosts, charged monthly, and why base prices keep creeping up industry-wide.

What IPv6 changes

IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses instead of IPv4’s 32-bit. The address space is so large it can give every atom on Earth billions of IPs. There’s no scarcity, so there’s no secondary market. Nobody sells IPv6 addresses because there’s nothing to sell.

At ColossusCloud, every VPS gets:

  • One IPv4 address (scarce, expensive to add more)
  • A full /64 IPv6 subnet (18 quintillion addresses, free)

Need a bigger subnet? Request a routed /56 (256 /64 subnets, enough for large IoT deployments or service fleets) through the Client Portal at no extra charge.

IPv4 vs IPv6: the real cost math

Suppose you need 10 public IPs for a project: separate mail server IPs, distinct SSL sites, one-IP-per-customer billing, multi-tenant isolation, etc.

With IPv4: ~$30/month per extra address as an industry-standard add-on. 10 extras = $300/month = $3,600/year just for addressing.

With IPv6: 10 addresses (or 10 billion) = $0. The VPS price is identical.

That’s real money, and it only gets worse as IPv4 prices rise.

What works on IPv6 today

A fair question: how many users can actually reach an IPv6-only service?

Global IPv6 adoption crossed 45% in 2024 per Google’s measurements, and climbs steadily. In India, France, Germany, and most mobile networks, adoption is above 70%. Your users very likely have IPv6 already.

Services that run great on IPv6-only infrastructure:

  • API backends where clients are mobile devices (most mobile carriers are dual-stack)
  • Internal microservices where clients are your own servers
  • IoT fleets where devices support IPv6 (most new ones do)
  • Static sites behind a dual-stack CDN like Cloudflare
  • Email servers, though IPv4 is still recommended for SMTP due to deliverability reputation

Services that still need IPv4:

  • Public web servers without a CDN in front
  • Anything targeting IPv4-only legacy clients
  • SSH/RDP access from networks without IPv6

For new deployments, one IPv4 at the edge plus IPv6 everywhere else is the cheapest and most scalable pattern.

How to cut your IPv4 address cost on ColossusCloud

  1. Log in to the Client Portal
  2. Enable the IPv6 interface on your VPS from the network settings
  3. Bring up the interface in your OS (automatic via SLAAC on most Linux distros)
  4. Use your /64 subnet for everything that doesn’t need IPv4

For multi-server projects or IoT deployments, request a routed /56 subnet. Free, and you can split it into 256 separate /64 networks for different services or clusters.

The bigger picture

The IPv4 address cost isn’t coming down. The shortage is permanent, the secondary market is the only way to get more addresses, and prices will keep climbing. Every year you delay moving workloads to IPv6 is another year of paying scarcity premiums.

You don’t have to rip out IPv4 overnight. Dual-stack deployments are the practical middle ground: keep IPv4 at the edge where it matters, use IPv6 everywhere else, shrink the IPv4 footprint over time.

For new infrastructure, design IPv6-first. You’ll save money immediately and future-proof against the next round of IPv4 price hikes.

Deploy a ColossusCloud VPS with IPv6 and stop paying scarce IPv4 address costs.

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