It has been known for quite a while that the global pool of IPv4 addresses is quickly being exhausted. This was inevitable with only 4.3 billion IP addresses available and the ever increasing number of devices with a connection to the internet.

The 5 Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) received their last IP addresses in February of last year. RIPE NCC (Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre), the RIR for Europe, Russia and the Middle East has started to allocate IP from their last /8 range in September of this year. This final range contains 16.8 million IP addresses. Ripe will not allocate IP addresses according to the need of providers anymore, instead this they will allocate each of their members a /22 with 1024 IP addresses. This means that here at CloudVPS, we will have to start dipping into our reserves shortly.

http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion/ipv4-available-pool-graph

Internet Protocol version 6 – IPv6

Luckily there is an alternative to IPv4: the IPv6 protocol that has an enormous number of IP addresses, 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to be exact.

The challenge is that every IP device will have to switch to IPv6. Access providers like BT and KPN are especially slow in adopting IPv6 because they have received large alloactions in the past and don't feel the need to change. Eventually an increasing number of services will switch to IPv6 only and that means everybody will have to change at some point.

We started supporting IPv6 in our network in June of 2008, and every virtual server gets a huge allocation of IPv6 addresses. We recommend our customers to make the switch as soon as possible. Let us know if you have any questions on this.

Our Measures

We have IPv4 reserves that will last us a while but we want to make absolutely sure we want to continue delivering IPv4 capacity with our virtual servers until most of the internet has switched to IPv6. This means we have to make some changes.

As of now we will provide one IPv4 address with every virtual server. More IPv4 addresses can be made available on the usual terms. There will have to be a valid reason, like usage for SSL, and there is a cost of EUR 3.95 per IP per year.