07-10-15 | Blog Post

Why IP addresses are no longer free

Blog Posts

In 1989, when “The Simpsons” featured its first telephone prank in Season 1, Episode 3, IP addresses were basically free.

Times have changed. Did you know that the world is now running low on IP addresses? With the advent of the “Internet of Things,” everything from TVs, phones, watches—even refrigerators, washing machines, thermostats and air conditioning units—has an IP address, so the available addresses are quickly being used up. ARIN, the organization that manages all IP addresses, is putting lots of restrictions into place that basically mean “No more for you!”

Why is this important? If cloud service providers were to run out of IP addresses, it would mean you couldn’t put anything in the cloud on the Internet. Smart companies are managing the resource carefully, which means they’re buying more. But because the supply of IP addresses is low and demand is high, they are much more expensive than they were just a few years ago. To ensure that companies use IP addresses judiciously, which is something ARIN really wants to see happen, ARIN is no longer giving them away for free.

Neither is Online Tech, however, we’ve also greatly improved the quality of our IPs. When you get an IP address from Online Tech, you get a lot more than access to the Internet. For instance, you get:

  • Tracking: We provide bandwidth tracking in a super-easy-to-use graphing tool that provides data transfer analytics for every IP address.
  • Protection: The watchful software security eyes of Radware, ExtraHop, PRTG (and more) a Network Operations Center (NOC) and a network staff that notices odd behavior and reacts to it 24/7.
  • Scrubbed IP Addresses: We check the IP address before we assign it to you. If you find it’s been blacklisted by other locations for any reason, we’ll swap it for another one.
  • IP Management: We use special tools to track exactly which IP address you have and when, so you don’t have to.

The important thing to keep in mind is that IP addresses—something we all used to take for granted—are no longer abundant, and of that limited supply, the quality varies. It will be several more years until the new IPv6 protocol remedies the situation, so it’s critical to be prepared. Make sure that you, your cloud service provider, and your clients have enough IP addresses now and into the foreseeable future.

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