Your VPS Bill Just Went Up. IPv4 Scarcity Isn't Why.
OVHcloud raised its IPv4 prices in 2026 and named the cause itself: not address scarcity, but the AI-driven memory shortage hitting every cloud bill.
On April 1, 2026, OVHcloud raised the price of an extra IPv4 address, the numeric label every server needs to be reachable on the internet, from 1.50 euros a month to 2.00 euros. The company had raised that same price once before, in 2022, and blamed the well-known shortage of IPv4 addresses. This time, in the announcement itself, it named a completely different cause.
That cause has nothing to do with how many IP addresses exist. It is the same shortage that has been pushing up the price of a new Mac and a graphics card this year, and it turns out, a line item on a hosting bill too.
Why your IPv4 add-on got pricier on April 1
The increase came from OVHcloud’s own founder and chairman, Octave Klaba, in a pricing announcement published on March 5, 2026. It covers more than IPv4: Public Cloud instances, Bare Metal servers, every 2026 VPS plan, VPS Local Zones, and floating IPs all went up too, effective April 1. Two older, budget server ranges, Kimsufi and So You Start, were left out.
OVHcloud says it is absorbing most of the cost itself rather than passing it on in full. New cloud deployments made between 2026 and 2028 see an average increase of 9 to 11 percent. Anything already deployed before 2025 rises by a smaller 2 to 6 percent. The IPv4 add-on, going from 1.50 to 2.00 euros a month, sits inside that same pricing update, not as a special case, but as one line among several.
That detail matters for what comes next. A price change aimed specifically at IPv4 would suggest something about IPv4 itself changed. A price change that touches VPS plans, bare metal servers, and cloud instances at the same time points somewhere else: at what all of those things are built from.
No, the internet didn’t run out of IPv4 addresses again
IPv4 is the addressing system that has run the internet since the 1980s, and it only has about 4.3 billion possible addresses. That sounds like a lot until you count phones, servers, and routers worldwide. The five regional registries that hand out IPv4 address blocks, covering Asia-Pacific, Latin America, North America, Africa, and Europe, all exhausted their free pools between 2011 and 2019. The last one ran dry more than six years before this price increase.
The internet kept working anyway, mostly through a technique called network address translation, or NAT, which lets many devices share a single public IPv4 address, the way an office shares one street address for a whole building of mailboxes. Internet providers use a carrier-grade version of the same trick to serve entire cities from a shrinking pool of addresses. A secondary market for buying and selling spare IPv4 blocks has existed for over a decade too. None of that is new in 2026, and none of it explains why a price changed on a specific date this year. Something that has been true since before 2020 cannot be the reason a bill went up in April 2026.
What OVHcloud actually blames: the AI-driven memory crunch
The March 2026 announcement is specific about the real cause: a global disruption in the memory market that started in autumn 2025, as chip manufacturers shifted production capacity toward the processors used to train and run AI models. That shift squeezed the supply of RAM and flash storage, the memory chips every server, laptop, and phone depends on, at the same time. OVHcloud’s own words: prices for RAM and storage could rise by 15 to 300 percent compared to 2025, depending on the component.
The contrast with 2022 is the clearest evidence of what changed. Back then, OVHcloud raised IPv4 prices and said so directly: address scarcity itself, with the open market price of a single IPv4 address reaching 50 dollars or more that year. In 2026, the same company raised the same fee and pointed to an entirely different shortage. One company, two IPv4 price increases four years apart, two different stated causes. That is not a coincidence of wording. It reflects what was actually driving each decision.
Hetzner, a competing European host, adjusted its own dedicated-server and cloud pricing on June 15, 2026, without publishing a reason in that announcement. Its published IPv4 pricing, however, has stayed unchanged since April 2023. The honest read is not that every hosting company is repricing IPv4 for the same reason OVHcloud is. It is that hosting costs broadly are under pressure in 2026, and IPv4, cheap enough for years to go unnoticed on an invoice, is one of the places that pressure has become visible first.
IPv6, the newer addressing system with room for far more devices than IPv4 will ever run out of, stays free at both companies. There is no scarce resource to price there, so there is nothing on that line to raise.
What this means for your next server renewal
Fifty cents a month sounds trivial, and for one server it is. It stops being trivial once you count how many IPv4 addresses a real setup actually uses: one per VPS, often more for load balancers, staging environments, or servers kept around out of habit long after they stopped mattering. A fleet of fifty forgotten addresses now costs 100 euros a year more than it did in March, for no functional difference to anyone using the service.
The practical response is not to panic about an old scarcity story. It is to check what a given server actually needs a dedicated IPv4 address for. Traffic between your own services, internal APIs, background jobs, most server-to-server communication, works fine over IPv6-only or behind a shared address, the same NAT-style sharing that residential internet has used for years. A public-facing website still generally needs one, since a meaningful share of visitors still reach the internet over IPv4-only connections. The right move is an audit, not a blanket migration: keep IPv4 where a real audience needs it, drop it where nothing does.
That same instinct, checking what a bill’s line items are actually for instead of assuming last year’s setup still makes sense, applies well beyond one address. Cloud pricing has a habit of drifting upward through changes that never make the announcement headline, the same pattern this site has traced through why the cheapest AWS Lambda setting often costs more, not less. An IPv4 line that quietly went from 1.50 to 2.00 euros is a small example of a much bigger one: infrastructure costs in 2026 are moving for reasons that have nothing to do with the resource named on the invoice.
Frequently asked questions
Is IPv4 running out again in 2026?
No. All five regional internet registries exhausted their free IPv4 pools between 2011 and 2019, and the internet has run on address-sharing techniques like NAT ever since. That exhaustion is old, settled history, not a 2026 event, and it is not what caused this year’s price increases.
Why did OVHcloud specifically raise its IPv4 price?
OVHcloud’s own March 2026 announcement names a global memory market disruption starting in autumn 2025, driven by chip manufacturers redirecting production toward AI hardware, which squeezed the supply of RAM and storage components used across its entire server lineup. IPv4 pricing rose as part of that broader update, not as an isolated decision about address scarcity.
Did every hosting provider raise its IPv4 prices in 2026?
Not confirmed. OVHcloud’s IPv4 increase is documented and dated. Hetzner adjusted its general dedicated-server and cloud pricing in June 2026 without stating a reason, while its own published IPv4 pricing has stayed the same since 2023. Treat any specific provider’s pricing as something to check directly rather than assume from one example.
Is IPv6 free?
Yes, at both OVHcloud and Hetzner, and generally across the hosting industry. IPv6 has such a large address space that there is no scarcity to price for, unlike IPv4, where every address is a limited resource someone eventually has to pay for.
Should I move everything to IPv6-only to avoid the increase?
Only where it makes sense. Internal traffic between your own servers usually works fine on IPv6-only or a shared address. A server that the public reaches directly, like a customer-facing website, typically still needs a dedicated IPv4 address, since a real share of visitors still connect over IPv4-only networks. Audit what each address is actually for before removing any of them.
The takeaway
The IPv4 line on a 2026 hosting bill went up for the same reason a new Mac or a graphics card did, not because addresses ran out again, but because the chips that store data got more expensive when the industry redirected memory production toward AI hardware. OVHcloud said so in its own words, and said something different four years ago when the real cause actually was IPv4 scarcity. The next time a familiar cost creeps up, the fix is not to reach for the explanation that used to fit. It is to check, in the provider’s own words if possible, what actually changed this time.
