
Ask HN: How can individuals or small businesses acquire IP addresses? - jamieweb
Due to IPv4 address exhaustion and the IPv6 lack of adoption, the days of owning your own IP address range seem long gone...<p>It&#x27;s no longer feasible for individuals or small businesses to purchase their own ranges, mainly because of the high cost, barrier to entry, responsibilities, etc.<p>Do any solutions exist that allow you to purchase small numbers of IP addresses for your own permanent use?<p>I understand that due to limitations in BGP, you can&#x27;t announce a single IP address to a different location than the rest of the range. However, could there be an overlay protocol or service that allows this to happen?<p>Renting IPs from hosting services like Linode or AWS doesn&#x27;t count, as they are locked-in to the hosting provider and you don&#x27;t own them directly.<p>Any suggestions?
======
icedchai
You want an IPv4 broker. Do a Google search. You can find several firms
selling IP blocks. The going rate is around $20/IP, or about $5K for a /24
(class C.)

I believe you will still need to be able to justify the need for the address
space to complete the transfer. "Justifying" a /24 should not be difficult.

(I've owned a /24 since the early 90's...)

~~~
jamieweb
Are you able to recommend any reputable brokers that offer IPv4 addresses for
a price suitable for individuals or small businesses? I only need a few
addresses ideally.

~~~
jonny_storm
Be aware that there are caveats in this approach. First, a /24 or larger range
is compulsory for multi-provider BGP, which is, itself, compulsory for dynamic
advertisement in the way you want. Second, broker ranges are only suitable for
your use case if they are _allocations_ rather than _reassignments_. Third,
even when a broker has reassignable ranges, they need to then use _detailed
reassignment_ rather than _simple reassignment_ for your new block. Otherwise,
you will be unable to announce prefixes to providers requiring proof of
ownership. Please refer to
[https://www.arin.net/resources/request/reassignments.html](https://www.arin.net/resources/request/reassignments.html)
for detailed information on the SWIP process.

In every recent case I've seen (over the last six years), no broker has had
ranges larger than /24 for reassignment. Of course, you can do with just a
/24, but the justification process has also grown somewhat more stringent, as
a pure traffic engineering justification ("We need BGP; here is why.") is no
longer enough, in my experience.

------
jonny_storm
You are quite right that IPv4 is exhausted and unobtainable. Moreover, your
intuition about IPv6 is also correct, though I would argue the lack of
Internet-scale protocol translation is what actually destroys the IPv6 value
proposition.

The limitation you point out is not actually in BGP but is, instead, a matter
of convention: ISPs will, generally, accept prefixes longer (smaller) than /24
but will not advertise them to other ISPs, in turn. This convention arose out
of the need to mitigate the steady increase of core routing table size--as did
CIDR, itself, and VLSM before it.

While not ideal, most organizations use DNS for failover of individual,
redundant hosts from one address to another. Of course, you may find this
unsuitable for your use case, but if the users of your host's service are "the
Internet," then the only alternative is to mediate how those users access the
host, either by inserting a proxy or creating redundant connections with a
custom client on the host.

If you can provide more detail regarding your specific requirements, I may be
able to elaborate further, more bespoke alternatives.

~~~
ThePhysicist
It’s not true that IPv4 is unobtainable, you can e.g. apply to become a RIPE
member & LIR to obtain a /22 subnet of addresses. The cost is in the several
1000 €’s per year if I remember correctly. You can equally well try to reach
out to an existing LIR and rent addresses from them of course. Not sure if
that corresponds to your definition of “owning” IP addresses but as a LIR you
can theoretically hold on to the addresses indefinitely.

More info: [https://www.ripe.net/participate/member-support/become-a-
mem...](https://www.ripe.net/participate/member-support/become-a-member)

~~~
jonny_storm
Because RIPE's last /8 is gone, any remaining addresses will come from
whatever has been recovered. Under no circumstances should you expect to
receive a contiguous /22 through LIR registration. Still, for obtaining
routable /24s, the LIR route will likely remain viable for the next year or
so.

------
FlyMoreRockets
If you are a licensed amateur radio operator, you can obtain an IP addresses
through AMPRNet for packet radio type applications.

[http://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Requesting_a_block](http://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Requesting_a_block)

Note, this is not for permanent use. From the above link: "You also must login
every 3-6 months even if it's just to check in to keep your block active,
you've been warned!"

~~~
jamieweb
Interesting note actually, thanks. :)

------
jimnotgym
Yes, you just rent them off your ISP as part of your package.

This is totally normal for an SME who might buy business FTTC or a lease-line
with 5 static IPv4 addresses included. Then you would set up one for incoming
mail, one for internet access, one for a site to site VPN etc. That sort of
thing. What use case do you have for owning an IP address separately from your
ISP?

