IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4
The 32-bit address space the internet was built on — exhausted at the registry, still indispensable in practice.
The fourth (and first widely-deployed) version of the Internet Protocol, standardised in RFC 791 in 1981. Uses 32-bit addresses written as four decimal octets — for example 198.51.100.42 — giving a theoretical address space of roughly 4.3 billion addresses. The IANA-level pool was exhausted in 2011; allocation since then has been from regional registry reserves and the secondary market.
Every plan ships with a dedicated public IPv4.
IPv4 is a scarce resource that the regional registries stopped handing out fresh blocks of more than a decade ago. The price of a clean /24 has tripled since 2020 and is unlikely to come down. Hosts who do not want to deal with the cost run carrier-grade NAT, shared-IP setups or "IPv6-only with a tunnel" arrangements — all of which surface as broken reachability on the customer's side. We do not do any of that.
Every NordBastion VPS gets at least one dedicated public IPv4 address, with full inbound and outbound connectivity, your reverse DNS, and no port restrictions other than the standard SMTP-25 throttle on new accounts. Plans that need multiple addresses can request them. The dedicated-server catalogue ships with at least one IPv4 and supports additional /29 or /28 allocations on request.
Operationally we treat IP space the way we treat any other shared resource: we monitor reputation against the major anti-abuse lists, we delist promptly when a customer's workload misbehaves and the workload is corrected, and we do not recycle IPs aggressively. The end result is that the address you receive on day one is the one you keep, and it is clean.
The pages that lean on this term.
The questions people actually ask.
Why does every VPS need an IPv4 address?
Because the long tail of the public internet — older hosts, badly maintained corporate networks, large parts of the SMTP world, a depressing share of consumer ISPs — still does not speak IPv6 cleanly. A server that wants to be reachable from arbitrary internet clients without surprises needs a public IPv4 address. Some workloads can get away with IPv6-only (CI runners, internal services), but a customer-facing service really cannot.
Why are IPv4 addresses expensive?
Because the regional registries ran out of fresh allocations a decade ago. Every new IPv4 address handed to a new customer has to come from the secondary market — bought, leased or transferred from someone who has more than they currently need. The market price has roughly tripled over the last five years and is unlikely to fall.
Is the IPv4 address on my VPS dedicated or shared?
On NordBastion, every VPS gets at least one dedicated public IPv4 address — yours alone, with full inbound and outbound connectivity. Additional IPv4s are available for plans that need them. We do not run carrier-grade NAT or shared-IP setups on the standard catalogue.
What is "IP reputation" and does my VPS IP have a clean one?
IP reputation refers to the heuristic scores that anti-abuse services (spam blacklists, captcha vendors, fraud detectors) attach to an IP based on past behaviour from that address. NordBastion ranges are clean on the major lists at allocation and we monitor that on an ongoing basis. Once a customer takes possession of an IP, the reputation of the workload that customer runs is, of course, the customer's responsibility.