A dedicated IPv4 address is one of those line items that never appears in the headline price of a plan and quietly shows up on renewal. The wholesale market behind that line moved a lot over the past two years, so it is worth knowing what the number is actually made of before you pay for a second address you may not need.
What the market did
After years of only going up, IPv4 prices fell hard in 2025. Large blocks lost more than half their value in a single year and reached ten-year lows: by the end of 2024 a /16 had dropped below thirteen dollars per address. Early 2026 data suggests the bottom is in and a gradual recovery has started, with large blocks expected to climb back toward fifteen to twenty-two dollars per address through the year.
For the buyer, two numbers matter. To own addresses outright, a /24 — the smallest block most networks will sell, 256 addresses — runs roughly twenty-eight to forty dollars per address, or about seven to nine thousand dollars as a one-time cost. To lease, the rate across most RIPE and ARIN space sits between about forty and fifty cents per address per month, with the Asia-Pacific region above sixty cents because supply there is tighter.
What that means on your bill
You almost never pay the wholesale rate. On a VPS the address reaches you through the provider, who carries the leasing or purchase cost and adds a margin, so a dedicated IPv4 typically appears as a small monthly or annual line item rather than forty cents. The gap between forty to sixty cents wholesale and what a plan charges is the provider's, and it is the part worth checking.
The arithmetic is small but not nothing. If a provider charges, say, two dollars a month for an extra dedicated address, that is twenty-four dollars a year — on a five-dollar-a-month VPS the second address is a forty percent add-on to the base price. One address is usually included; the cost shows up when a project needs a second or third, which is common the moment you run more than one TLS site or a mail server on the same box.
When you can avoid paying for it
Two cases let you skip the charge entirely. The first is IPv6: if your audience and upstream services are reachable over IPv6, an IPv6-only or IPv6-primary server needs no scarce IPv4 at all, and a growing number of providers price those plans lower for exactly that reason. The second is shared IPv4 with SNI and a reverse proxy — several sites on one address — which is fine for ordinary web hosting and only breaks down when a service genuinely needs its own address.
The genuine need is narrower than it looks. A mail server is the clear case: it wants its own dedicated address with a clean reputation and a matching reverse DNS record, and sharing is not an option. Direct TLS termination without a proxy, some game and VPN workloads, and anything that must be reached by raw IP are the others. For a single website behind a CDN or a reverse proxy, a second address is usually money spent on a line in the plan description.
What to check before you pay
Read the plan for three things: whether one dedicated IPv4 is included or the base price assumes shared, what an additional address costs per month, and whether that price holds on renewal. In the catalog the presence of a dedicated IPv4 is a per-plan field, so you can compare it rather than discover it at checkout, and the methodology explains how the address factors into the price-per-resource comparison. For a mail server, treat a dedicated address with reverse DNS as a requirement and size the rest around it — the mail-server workload page has the full checklist.
Figures in this piece are from xTom's June 2026 market write-up, citing IPv4.Global marketplace data and IPXO lease tracking, with lease rates corroborated by Larus.