IPv6 finally passed 50% of Google’s traffic this spring. On 28 March 2026, to be exact, after something like 18 years of “next year, for sure.”
Good news, mostly. But if you run anything business-critical, it doesn’t change much yet, because the stuff that actually pays the bills still leans on IPv4.
Your bank’s SFTP server probably does. Your biggest partner’s API gateway almost certainly does, and it likely only trusts a short list of addresses it approved by hand two years ago. Which brings up a question plenty of teams skip: whose IPv4 address are you actually using?
You Can’t Get New Ones for Free Anymore
The free supply ran out a long time ago. IANA handed out its last blocks in February 2011, and RIPE NCC (the registry covering Europe and the Middle East) gave away its final /22 in November 2019.
So now it’s a resale market. In August 2026 a single address went for roughly $13 to $27, and you pay more per IP if you only want a small /24 block. Renting is around $0.40 per address a month, which is why most smaller teams go that route.
For a team that needs five or ten clean IPs for one job, buying a block makes very little sense. Something like IPRoyal’s reliable ipv4 private proxy is usually the quicker option, since the address is yours alone and you skip the registry forms entirely.
Worth checking the history, though. Recycled IPs are everywhere now, and some of them come with baggage. Running a new IP through Spamhaus and a couple of other blocklists takes two minutes and saves a lot of grief later.
Reputation Sticks to the Address
Spam filters judge traffic partly on where it’s from. So do Cloudflare’s bot checks, and so does pretty much every fraud tool a payment provider runs.
Share an IP with strangers and you share their record too. One neighbor with a badly written scraper and suddenly your login page throws CAPTCHAs at real customers, or your invoices land in spam, and you have no idea why for a week.
Email is the worst case. Google’s email sender guidelines want valid forward and reverse DNS (PTR records) on sending IPs, and good luck setting a PTR record on an address someone else controls. Gmail and Yahoo also got much stricter in February 2024 with anyone sending over 5,000 messages a day.
A dedicated IP that’s been warmed up slowly over a few weeks is the boring answer here. Boring works.
Read Also: Best Ways to Hide Your IP Address in 2024 – Online Privacy Guide
Allowlists Don’t Like Surprises
Lots of B2B tools still let in only pre-approved IPs. Payroll providers and freight portals are classic examples. Very few of them accept IPv6-only clients.
Rotating addresses breaks that setup in an annoying, slow way. The IP changes, the nightly sync to the logistics partner fails at 2 a.m., somebody opens a ticket in the morning and then everyone waits a day or two for their IT team to update the list.
Static addresses make your own logs easier to read as well. If security spots something odd from a known IP, they can trace it to one machine in a few minutes, not guess which of 40 shared-pool tenants did it.
Isn’t IPv6 Supposed to Solve This?
Long term, yes. There are about 340 undecillion IPv6 addresses, so running out isn’t the problem; uneven adoption is. The Internet Society’s Pulse team put Google’s native IPv6 share at 50.10%, but Italy was near 17% and Spain about 10%.
Servers lag behind users. When engineer Jan Schaumann scanned the top one million domains in early 2026, only about 35% responded over IPv6. Put differently, close to two out of three big sites still need IPv4 to reach you.
And the stopgaps make shared addresses worse, not better. The Wikipedia article on IPv4 address exhaustion covers carrier-grade NAT, where an ISP squeezes many customers behind one public IP; great for the ISP, not so great if you need a clean reputation.
What to Do About It
Run both. Get IPv6 working where you can, and keep dedicated IPv4 for email and partner connections until the other side catches up. Big-block prices fell by more than half between mid-2024 and late 2025, so it’s cheaper than it was.
Will IPv4 eventually go away? Probably, though people have been predicting that since before most current sysadmins started their careers. Until it does, having your own addresses means fewer delisting forms and fewer 2 a.m. surprises.
