Markets in Not Quite Everything: IP Address Shortage
I migrated my server and in the process lost a block of 10 dedicated IP addresses I had. So I tried to sign up for the 10 addresses again, and got this:
Due to the global shortage of IPv4 addresses, we are now required to request justification for dedicated IP address requests. Each dedicated server comes with 4 dedicated IP addresses, in addition to the primary shared IP address. Additional IP addresses must be requested in blocks of 4 IPs ($16.00/month for each block of 4). Please be aware, at this time, the only acceptable justification for a dedicated IP address we can accept is for use with an SSL certificate. You will need to provide at a copy of the certificate(s) which will be installed, however, we do not need to install the certificate for you.
Obviously IPv6 is meant to relieve this but it is still a minority of Internet traffic.
Aheho:
Once SNI is supported among all the browser users, an SSL cert might no be justification for a dedicated IP address.
August 18, 2016, 9:33 amErikTheRed:
Everyone requires justification letters these days, even in datacenters where we're leasing several cabinets or a decent amount of floor space costing tens of thousands of dollars a month, but most providers are pretty lenient if you give them a halfway decent reason. Oddly, SSL really shouldn't have much to do with anything unless they're putting reverse proxies in front of some web servers in order to conserve address space, which may interfere with SSL operations in some cases.
August 18, 2016, 11:56 ammckyj57:
Yes. You can pretty much get away with it now -- depending who you talk to, 2-8% of browsers don't support SNI, and most of those are not good candidates for ecommerce (XP MSIE users, who are notoriously high-support customers).
August 18, 2016, 2:35 pmKurt:
Don't worry about it. Obama is handing the control of the IP addressing and traffic to ...
...someone. (Next month?) I'm not quite sure who, but I'm sure that it will fix everything.
Just as I'm sure that (whoever it is) will have the proper appreciation and gratitude for all that we have done in the past to create, built and run (neutrally) the whole shebang.
August 18, 2016, 8:58 pmJohn O.:
The IPv6 adoption problem is one that is mostly due to the fact that its not quite seamless. What its going to take is unfortunately is the FCC to mandate IPv6 use and create massive disruptions of people who still run lots of IPv4 dependent software.
August 19, 2016, 3:02 pmRay Van Dolson:
What do you need 10 IP's for, anyway?
August 19, 2016, 8:05 pmRay Van Dolson:
Hardly. It will happen when there's truly an exhaustion of IPv4 space that prevents people from getting to sites they want to get to or from doing the things they want to do.
August 19, 2016, 8:06 pmJohn O.:
No because most ISPs use a variation of Network Address Translation to get around the fact they don't have enough IP addresses to assign to their own customers.
August 20, 2016, 5:15 pmPatrick McGuire:
It's a comin' if you're enabled, it's majority mobile http://www.worldipv6launch.org/major-mobile-us-networks-pass-50-ipv6-threshold/
There are still a few groups sitting on massive (1/256 of all IP addresses aiece). Stanford chose to give theirs back, a lot didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
August 23, 2016, 7:00 pm