How $1 VPS plans survive: The secret math of shared IPv4 addresses

The article explains how budget VPS providers can offer $1 monthly plans by sharing scarce IPv4 addresses. Since IPv4 addresses are limited to about 4.3 billion globally and have been depleted for years, they've become commodities traded on markets, costing $20-$60 to buy outright or $0.35-$0.60 monthly to rent wholesale. Retail hosting providers charge significantly more—around €3.50 monthly per address.

The trick involves assigning dozens of customer servers to share a single public IPv4 address, with each server getting its own port block (5-30 ports). This splits the address cost to under 10 cents per server. The trade-off is that customers can't use standard ports like 22 for SSH or 80/443 for web traffic directly—they get custom port numbers instead. This clever economics makes ultra-cheap cloud hosting possible while highlighting the ongoing IPv4 scarcity problem.