Question

Can I get additional IP addresses for a Droplet?

Posted July 17, 2012 97.4k views
Can I get additional IP addresses for a Droplet?
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ahmedhassan7030 June 7, 2015

I’m not sure digital ocean really care about giving us multiple IP addresses. I only run few of mine here on DO and I run a hosting server on Amazon, bit expensive though compare to DO. but still OK.
I would be really great at least like 2-4 IPs max is allowed for droplets over $40/m + or something like that.

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moisey August 24, 2012
Hi Jonathan,

For SSL we'll be writing up an article that will allow users to use a single public IP and multiple backend private IPs to be able to run multiple SSL sites via a reverse proxy through nginx to an Apache SSL backend.

That way you won't need to use multiple IPs for hosting as many SSL enabled sites as you like.
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jtittle1 August 24, 2012
Multiple IP's would be nice in cases where more than one website is hosted on a single droplet. For instance, we have a number of clients that reside on servers/networks outside of DO. A handful of them require SSL for their websites/domains though don't need their own VPS (they just need a site that works, they don't want to manage a server). In the case of only allowing one IP per VPS, if we were to move them over, we'd need 1x VPS per 1x Client which would be overkill simply based on their collective needs.

Given that example (a real-life example, btw), it'd be nice to see 1 IP on the 256/512MB and the option to add an at least 2-4 IP's on the 1GB+ VPS's. On the larger VPS's that boast 4-8GB+ RAM (and beyond), it'd be nice to see even a limit of up to 10 IP's. I don't care to pay for the IP's, I don't expect them for free, though I would need them.


Just my 2c :-).
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spicer August 31, 2012
Cool. I learned something new today. Want to use Digital Ocean but I did not want to wait for additional IPs or the write up on Nginx.

So there is this cool things called SNI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Most modern browsers send the host name along with the ssl request. If you have a modern browser and a modern web server you are good.

It makes sense for us because we do not develop websites for older browsers. My only concern in the list of unsupported browsers is old Android Phone (before 3.0).

We use Lighttpd as a webserver. Using the configs in the URL below got us up and running.

http://tech.sybreon.com/2010/07/15/lighttpd-server-name-indication-sni/

So I guess in general I learned needing more than one IP for Https is almost a concept of the past. Unless you are still supporting really old versions of IE.

Just thought I would share.
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moisey October 18, 2012
If we had an infinite pool of IPv4 addresses it wouldn't be an issue and we could certainly provision more for each customer, but that was also the point behind HTTP supporting multiple domains on a single IP because it became obvious quickly that a single IP just to separate a domain wasn't a great approach.

There's also a common misconception that sharing an IP for multiple domains lowers your SEO score which isn't true unless you are actively trying to game SEO by creating multiple sites that have similar content and are cross linking to each other, so the gains there are minimal and at worst are actually a detriment to overall SEO ranks because large search engines like Google are constantly refining their methods for screening for SEO gaming tricks.

So really we are back to where we started which is we love to hear from customers about their needs for more public IP addresses and see if we can find a solution which will take care of their issue.

We just published an article about how to setup multiple SSL sites on a single IP using nginx and that is supported by the majority of the latest browsers so that's one big issue that's now resolved.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-up-multiple-ssl-certificates-on-one-ip-with-nginx-on-ubuntu-12-04

If there are other specific instances please let us know!

Thanks
How To Set Up Multiple SSL Certificates on One IP with Nginx on Ubuntu 12.04
by Etel Sverdlov
Although hosting several sites on a single virtual private server is not a challenge with the use of virtual hosts, providing separate SSL certificates for each site traditionally required separate IP addresses. The process has recently been simplified through the use of Server Name Indication (SNI), which sends a site visitor the certificate that matches the requested server name.
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  • curl October 6, 2016

    PTR records. You can only have one per IP. I have two domains on one droplet and would like to send email from both. Not having a PTR record for one results in the mail being treated as spam by some mailservers.

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moisey September 4, 2013
Hi Geoff,

Thanks for writing in!

Unfortunately this is has absolutely nothing to do with us trying to sell more droplets and everything to do with limited IPv4 IP space.

APNIC is completely out of IPv4 space, RIPE ran out earlier this year, and ARIN will be out within the next 6-12 months. Latin America will be out of IP space in about 12 months.

Internet standards have been modified over time to avoid the necessity of having a single IP per service and that led to allowing multiple virtualhosts on a single IP and now almost every modern browser even supports multiple SSL certs on a single IP.

With any commodity where there is a limited supply when the supply runs out this creates a market for that commodity. While we do pay fees to the governing bodies for any IPs that we are allocated these fees pale in comparison to the amount that we must spend to purchase IPs from other providers.

In our Amsterdam region our last two allocations have been purchased and each allocation has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. And unfortunately this price will only increase over time as the resource becomes more scarce.

There is effectively only one solution to this global dilemma and it is the global adoption of IPv6 however that requires everything along the network path to be upgraded and capable of fully supporting IPv6. This is a huge change and while IPv6 has been around for quite some time global adoption is in the sub 5% region. The good news is that once ARIN runs and out Latin America runs out I think the timeline for everyone updating their equipment and so forth will be expedited so we should see an exponential adoption curve of IPv6 at that point.

Welcome any replies or comments that you may have.

Thanks!
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snipe January 27, 2015

I need second IP address for fully “webrtc stun server”. Is it possible?

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Remram October 2, 2015

I’m surprised to see after 3 years of constant BS, digital ocean hasn’t implemented this (“due to the global shortage of IPs” is a straight-out lie: I can create two droplets, why can’t I create a droplet with two IPs?).

atlantic (which to be honest looks like a pixel-perfect rip-off of digital ocean) offers this feature, if anyone is interested.

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  • dezmd November 12, 2015

    2015 and still no multiple IPs? I’ve had a droplet running on here for years with a few sites on it, was fine with one IP until today, lo and behold, DO still doesn’t offer multiple IPv4 addresses. The justifications provided in this thread, while reasonable at face value, are still completely against the grain of a their customer needs and expectations. This is very frustrating and I will have to engage a third party now for a client. DO is literally losing money because of their decisions to not allow multiple IPv4 addresses on a single droplet (and at $5 per low end droplet with a static IP, what’s with the nonsensical reasoning!). If it’s a hard limitation with the way the entire droplet system or infrastructure is designed, just say so.

    Reply Report
moisey July 18, 2012
Hi,

We currently don't support multiple IP addresses for the same droplet, but if you give us some more info on what you're looking to setup we may be able to recommend a solution where we can work around the restriction of 1 IP per droplet.

Thanks
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jtittle1 August 24, 2012
Out of curiosity, what about those that would prefer to not run dual web servers? We use NGINX + Varnish & Litespeed exclusively and would prefer not to have to run Apache along side. On the Litespeed servers, we're using CPanel as clients have expressed a need for a control panel to ease day-to-day management. In such a case, Apache is disabled completely and Litespeed handles SSL & Non-SSL. We switched to LS & NGINX to avoid having to use Apache where possible :-). Having to run Apache along side NGINX or Litespeed to handle SSL isn't an ideal solution.

I know managing IP's can be a headache, with the requirement of validation of use, though IP's are essential to quite a few setups and for those using CPanel, or any CP really, private IP's are not always handled correctly. While this is primarily due to software, there have been cases where it just doesn't work.
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moisey August 24, 2012
Even better, nginx is the preferred route, I believe there's a way to configure it directly to support multiple SSLs on the same IP.

We'll work that into an article and post it to the community.

If that's the only concern I think we can get around it with Nginx awesomeness.
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jtittle1 August 24, 2012
It's both, NGINX + CPanel (or DirectAdmin, Plesk, Interworx, etc). With CPanel, for instance, I know there have been issues with private IP's in the past, so that would be one area where we'd really need multiple IP's, or a fix to remedy issues with private.
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moisey August 24, 2012
Yeah that would be a bit more complex because CPanel is very restrictive on any modifications to the core services that are managed by it.

We would need to be a bit more creative around that.
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nikos.vrellos August 28, 2012
I think that the model 1 IP/droplet won't work for business customers. Some they need their own NS, SSL etc.

It would be best for customers and you to be able to have more IPs with valid justification.

Thanks
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spicer August 31, 2012
This feature is a big one for us. Really would like a way to have more than on IP. +1 on the feature request list.
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santhan September 12, 2012
Easily adding IPs to a droplet is important to us. We dedicate one IP for a single production website for various reasons. With my current host, we pay $1 a month for an IP and our VPS slice comes with two dedicated IPs. We run multiple websites on a single finely tuned LEMP stack, managing DNS with Route53. From what I can tell, DO would be an ideal solution for us when IP management/allocation can accommodate our requirements.
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moisey September 12, 2012
Hi Spicer,

Absolutely right.

It was the same issue early in the web and one of the largest changes to the HTTP protocol was to support multiple domains on a single IP address.

We constantly review our traffic and we're super excited that over 80% is non-IE so in many cases using multiple SSL domains on a single IP will not impact as large a number of users as people may suspect.

Another option is to use IPv6 addresses which listen for SSL and then use nginx as the front-end web server which will reverse proxy to the IPv6 addresses, however unfortunately we do not have IPv6 support yet.
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urizan October 17, 2012
I am in agreement with Santhan that IP subnetting be in favor of the network administrators hosting multiple internet sites with a unique IP for each.

DO might offer subnet price packages like so,

Network: 205.45.10.14/.255.255.255.240
Address Range: 205.112.10.15 through 205.112.10.28
Subnet Broadcast Address: 205.112.10.29

This example gives the website hosting provider 30 unique IP addresses from the following range of local addresses provisioned by DO:

192.168.1.16
192.168.1.32
192.168.1.48
192.168.1.64
192.168.1.80
192.168.1.96
192.168.1.112
192.168.1.128
192.168.1.144
192.168.1.160
192.168.1.176
192.168.1.192
192.168.1.208
192.168.1.224

No two companies should be forced to share the same IP AND no two website developers should be forced to buy more than one server instance in order to maintain a competitively priced service to the market. I admit $5 is cheap but what about the time it takes to setup a new instance for just one, maayyyybeeee two, IP addresses? People just aren't as excited as DO about this limitation.
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kyle.t.ross March 12, 2013
I'm very interested in this option. It would be helpful for users that want to run a single website anonymously without needing to deploy an additional droplet. There are many legitimate reasons for wanting to operate a website anonymously. One example of this would be a popular YouTube user not wanting to reveal personal details about themselves.
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rajuru April 15, 2013
i was thinking to move my hosting biz over here. but two things stopped me for time being:
1. Additional IP. Many customers want their dedicated IP.
2. Storage is not doubled as priced did. Moreover, there is no way to buy additional space.

i think that's why people still goes to AWS though digitalocean is cheaper.

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gio.arteaga April 19, 2013
Where can I find the guide mentioned above? "..able to run multiple SSL sites via a reverse proxy through nginx to an Apache SSL backend."

What has stopped me to give DO business?
1. I have customers with cPANEL. I need 3 ips per 1gig and 2gig droplets. 1 for hostname/self dns, 2 different sites with dedicated ips.
2. Ability to mount more space.
3. For now, I am staying with LiquidWeb and Amazon. :)
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lance April 20, 2013
to run cpanel we need multiple ip's. For each ssl needs a dedicated IP. hosting customers that use cpanel will almost always need an IP. some payment gateways in Europe require a dedicated IP (I have such a client). impossible to setup a whcms enabled cpanel automated provisioning to get maximum density on each droplet.
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parinda May 22, 2013
i also need . i hope to use whm and resell hosting . so i need more ip. and please allow to add extra disk space
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kamaln7 May 23, 2013
Extra disk space is not possible at the moment, neither are additional IPs.
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jermops May 29, 2013
The problem with using SNI is that ~39% os the internet is still on windowsXP and _NO_ version of IE on XP supports SNI.
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khoaofgod May 31, 2013
Just stupid, LOL.. I am using cPanel, and now NameSever, SSL required Dedicated IP. I will cancel my Droppet today... LOL... Very bad,
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chris170731 June 27, 2013
I also require multiple discreet IPs per instance. If you provide some way to map internal to external, ala AWS, that is sufficient. I'll keep a small instance here as a dev server, but cannot go to production until you support multiple IPs.
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correo July 1, 2013
i havent moved to DO cause of this, i mean for example i need a droplet with a streaming server (icecast) streaming on 80 port for avoid firewall blocking on offices, etc and a web server also on 80 port for control panel & statistics (centova). i think i cant achive this without 2 ips.
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darkpal July 1, 2013
Looks like I have to cancel my droplet because I can't setup NS without additional IP
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kamaln7 July 2, 2013
@darkpal: You can set both ns1 and ns2 to the same IP address. I recommend create a second DNS slave droplet for ns2 for redundancy purposes.
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support180371 July 8, 2013
Same, I'll need to cancel my droplet as I need dedicated IP's for clients.
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contact182777 July 9, 2013
Dang. I was really looking forward to taking the SSD out for a spin. Count me as a refunder due to bizarre single IPv4 address limitation. Getting additional IPs is so ubiquitous these days, I just (stupidly) assumed DO would be able to provision more, like *every* other service provider on the planet. I can even get multiple IPs for my own home internet connection. Guys (and gals), this is just really silly and harming your business. I have a couple of companies relying on my experience with DO before they take the plunge, and I'm absolutely certain this weird limitation is going to immediately turn them off of your services. I loved everything up to this point. Aloha!
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geert July 11, 2013
Bummer....

Really need additional IPs!
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tanaris4 July 14, 2013
+1 to be able to purchase more IPs
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ataxali July 16, 2013
I second (or third or fourth) the call for additonal IPs per droplet.

You shouldn't assume that just because we want unique IPs for each of our sites, that we are trying to "game SEO".
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chad1 July 18, 2013
Bummer...this is a deal breaker for me as well.
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info187161 July 28, 2013
Unfortunately in Ukraine an old IE6 is still in use. So how do we solve the problem with SSL? Any ideas appreciated.
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kamaln7 July 28, 2013
@info: Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about that other than creating a separate droplet per SSL website if you want to support IE6.
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yotamiles August 24, 2013
I also need multiple dedicated IPs to provide hosting to my clients (as I am providing web hosting services to many of my clients via WHM cPanel). Please must provide this support ASAP, otherwise this service will be in vein for me.
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stephane.busso August 28, 2013
I'm interested also about multiple IPs, is there any update since last september?
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mark214552 September 2, 2013
I won't be using this as a major production server for large sites until you do this.
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geoff236550 September 4, 2013
To DO management responsible for product strategy:
Regarding the issue of adding additional IP addresses to a single Droplet... There is more to this issue than meets the eye.

I fully understand the business logic of limiting IP address space in order to sell more Droplets. You make it hard for an administrator to do too much with a single Droplet, so that s/he will have to have multiple Droplets to answer their business need.

However, this is short-sighted, both economically and strategically. The theory may work in an isolated system, but we don't have that in this case, we have a free-market system with lots of providers to choose from. The sysadmin will be more concerned about time lost managing multiple (unnecessary) Droplets, when one larger one could just as easily do the job if it could support multiple IP addresses. So the time-focused sysadmin would choose a different provider, and DO will lose out there.

The sysadmin's manager will have issues with his/her time being eaten up managing multiple Droplets, but they will also be focused on the price. Yes, DO is reasonably priced, but this manager will be forever asking "why do we need 17 of these for such small web apps? Wouldn't one Droplet with 17 sites do the job?" And the answer is, yes it would of course, if Droplets could support multiple IP address. So you may get some business from this kind of user, but after a bit of growth (and a budget review or two) they would eventually move elsewhere too, and DO would lose out again.

Then there's the independent freelancer, who makes websites. There is almost always an accumulation of such sites for smaller clients who cannot (or don't want to) provide staff and skills to manager their own hosting infrastructure, so they frequently ask the developer to do it. Cloud virtual server products are perfect for these developers, because they can just tack on new clients as they come up and increase their virtual infrastructure from time to time. They want to spend their time developing, and don't have time for managing multiple servers. They will prefer to use management platforms like cPanel or ISPConfig in order to provision and manage sites with a minimum of technical activity. These are the people you appear to be targeting in your demographic, but without supporting multiple IPs you aren't really targeting that market effectively. You are only appealing to the segment with enough staff and paying clients to maintain a Droplet for each client. But the fact is that there are MANY MORE one-person operations than multi-staff freelancers. If you want to own that market segment, look at what they need and give it to them. They want multiple IP addresses? So give it to them. So what if there are complex alternative ways to solve the problem... they haven't come here for that. They've come here to see if they can move all their clients into a Droplet with a minimum of technical fuss. Reverse proxies and new protocols with partial browser support may be one answer, but it's not the one they are looking for.

You'll notice also that the people active in this thread (and in similar discussions on AWS fora) are not just very keen on getting multiple IPs - it is actually a deal-breaker for them. And looking at some of the comments above, they are not just accepting the situation - they are in fact BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED that they can't use DO because of this.

But let me give you the biggest reason why you need it. Amazon doesn't do it. Yes, they offer multiple IPs on their VPC systems, but on standard EC2 EBS-backed instances, it is not available. And yet there are new posts every day asking for it. If DO was my business, I would be championing a serious case to push this feature through without delay. When it is ready, it just needs a few well-placed posts in some of those AWS threads discussing this issue, and people will jump ship in droves.
If it was me, I would be pushing this through as quickly as possible. There is a groundswell of need for this (as you see) and so it is only a matter of time before Amazon offers it on EC2. They may even be working on it as we speak. So get this feature done, roll it out and announce it everywhere, before Amazon does it.

P.S. The same applies for adding extra storage to a single Droplet. Although that isn't as urgent as the IP issue, because the rest of the providers in the market already offer it.

Geoff.
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xcckio September 6, 2013
sadly i think ill have to cancel as well >.< im loving u guys but i really need another ip not another droplet , should give or allow (sell us another ip) so we have max 2 ip at least per droplet >.
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admin249009 September 19, 2013
Damn I was about to sign-up for a VM here but as we run many websites on our servers and all require at least 8 IPs, I guess I am out of luck.

>>Internet standards have been modified over time to avoid the necessity of having a single IP per service and that led to allowing multiple virtualhosts on a single IP and now almost every modern browser even supports multiple SSL certs on a single IP.

>>With any commodity where there is a limited supply when the supply runs out this creates a market for that commodity.

This is a lacklustre response considering all the 'real world' and legitimate uses for a unique IP. Also your competitors are still offering them for $1 each, so the market you reference dictates that so should you.
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gpowers01 September 22, 2013
I just signed up and realized that there is a limit of one ip per droplet. This is a deal breaker for me. Sadly, I will be cancelling my account.

Digital Ocean management -> You really should listen to your (potential) customers rather than trying to force them into some contrived way of doing business that fits your business model. This thread has a simple tone that doesn't require any spectacular amount of insight to derive. The overwhelming response from most users is that they want more than one IP address per instance.
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moisey September 23, 2013
If you look at the overall architecture of the internet and see how things have developed a lot of items have been rather shortsighted and they have been reworked as a result.

We'd love to jump full steam into offering multiple IPs per droplet but unfortunately if we offered that we would end up running into other issues.

With the massive adoption of SNI and how protocols have changed over time to facilitate the expanded use of a single IP this really is the future. There is no reason why an SSL should require a dedicated IP except for a short sightedness when IP space seemed to be near limitless, though in reality anything that has a hard limit may in fact over time at some point be depleted.

If there are other use cases from customers outside of SSL cert issues we'd love to hear them.
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  • microcaicai November 6, 2014

    there are stupid server programs just refuse to reuse the ip address . that all.
    people will have to either fix the program with they might not have control
    or just leave DO.

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steve141358 September 24, 2013
Well, I run Apache sites on DO too, but the first SSL site I need t run is under Jetty, the Java application server I have running on one of my droplets. I hope I can figure out how to do this. Apache+SNI should be no big deal, there are lots of examples in the wild - but right now I need to configure SNI on Jetty.

Quite frankly, I considered the old one-ip-per-ssl restriction obnoxious, but it is what it is...
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chris109728 September 24, 2013
I'm a big fan of SNI, but I sell white labeled services to academic institutions. It is unfortunate, but many of them are still rocking Internet Explorer on Windows XP. We allow schools to use CNAMEs to point to their service, which means we would have to setup a new droplet for every customer. We *could* do that, but I would actually prefer to just pay you a couple bucks a month for each IP address. If you're charging $5 / mo for a small droplet, and each droplet comes with an IP, ostensibly your cost per IP address is less than $5 / mo.

You asked for "other use cases from customers outside of SSL cert issues." This isn't one of them. Just a legitimate concern that SNI does not work for us, even though I really wish it would. I can't sit around and wait for IPv6, nor can I count on Microsoft patching old versions of IE on XP to support SNI.

It might be that it just doesn't make business sense for you to sell me what I want (multiple IP addresses per droplet). That's not a big deal, it just means that I'll have to host elsewhere.
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KFlint September 27, 2013
Well I am just going to come out and say it. F*CK. I told my boss this morning as I was shutting down our stuff at Amazon that this just seemed like a dream, too good to be true. And it was. I never bothered to see if I could get my additional addresses, because I've never heard of a place you could not get what you needed. I was looking for the web form where I'd check the box to pay the extra 5-10 bucks a month I'm used to per address and wait a couple days until they were routed to me, and I found this nightmare.

Actually the nightmare is going to be explaining to Rainer, is a partner in the firm and very unhappy with me over the Amazon thing that I don't have a solution after all and stopped production for a move without doing due diligence on what to him will sound obvious and important, but to me I'm still thinking "what kind of host doesn't lease connections?".

Never thought I'd say this, but life was easier when I had permanent racks at Hurricane Electric and rented racks of iron from Rackspace when we had a game go live - none of this "cloud" "guess what is behind the curtain" shit.

Enough to drive an architect freaking mad!
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KFlint September 27, 2013
Oh well. At least this is still a great place to park a couple of WordPress sites I have been wanting to ditch someplace. WordPress running on SSD. What a waste.
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info129190 September 29, 2013
I really love DigitalOcean - but please make multiple IP per droplet possible. I want to move over some large websites were we have to use multiple SSL. SSL must also work on Windows XP so.... We're willing to pay extra for the IP's that is no issue....
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dinchev.dimitar October 14, 2013
You say that actually the problem is IPv4 availability and exhaustion. Then why not allow to use IPv6 for additional addresses?
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ryan291122 October 26, 2013
here is a reason to allow multiple IPs:
If you run a email server you need separate reverse DNS for each domain. Many email servers perform rDNS lookups and if it doesn't match you can be denied.

Do you want another reason?
Let's say someone wants to run multiple instances of the same program that has a well known default port. For some things like httpd you can run virtual instances, but that doesn't apply to things like game servers, some communication programs, etc. Basically anything that you want to make public but you want to run multiples of it where in order to connect the person would have to use a modified connection string that includes a non-default port.

Now for both of these, and several others I can give you, the most suitable argument is likely to be that you could spin of multiple servers. The downside being any discount differential you would lose from using smaller servers. So while people are offering to pay, I am subtly pointing out that they can already pay for it and put them on several smaller servers.

Also, while it does not mater to the person who switched from Amazon and mentioned Rackspace, since I doubt he will return. Rackspace has a very restrictive policy for their cloud servers and IPv4, and they would accept either of the above examples. I know because I have had to speak with several people in management, twice, to get them to change their original policy of no additional address'. However, once the realized that the email server rDNS lookup was pretty common they had to change their policy if they wanted to get entire organizations to move their stuff to the cloud.

However, for the price of the same server to Amazon or Rackspace you get it here for about half their cost. So once again... multiple servers.

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peter160393 October 29, 2013
We're in a difficult transitional time at the moment.
Hopefully everyone will be forced to upgrade from XP in April after support is dropped and we can start to adopt newer technologies like Server Name Indicators without fear of losing £££'s from unsupported customers.
Having previously run a data centre I have an understanding of RIPE allocations and how it's going to get tougher and tougher to get hold of an IP4 address.
Digital Ocean have a proven business model that's doing very well, it's not necessary to be everything for everyone. I applaud them for standing firm with their product offering and forcing the issue to be highlighted to users who need to be keeping up with the technology.
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digitalocean300369 October 31, 2013
Given that each droplet has a dedicated static IP, would it be possible for me to just by another droplet but assign the IP provided to the original droplet?
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kamaln7 October 31, 2013
That's not possible.
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billing November 2, 2013
You guys really need to sort this out. It is important for cPanel servers when you want to use two IP`s for nameservers.
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priyadarshan December 3, 2013
I was ready to open our commercial account with DO, but now I have to go somewhere else. We do need more than one IP for our 160GB droplets. On Linode is very easy, but Linode has been so disappointing lately. Too bad. Please let me know when you can opffer as many IPs as one can justify, like AWS or Linode do.
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tanner.gettis December 7, 2013
Folks,

Are we still unable to purchase additional IPs?
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office324225 December 20, 2013
also a huge requirement for addl. IPs here
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b3460bc1037c20b7046009321bac6ef9 December 22, 2013
Same here. I need two IPs as the NIC for my TLD requires that I have two NSes on separate IPs with matching PTRs.
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matt368384 December 27, 2013
Echoing Joris's issue. .CA domains require two unique NS IPs - I had 5 domains transfers held up because of this. If you aren't planning on supporting multiple IPv4 addresses per droplet, then why not get the ball rolling on IPv6 support? Then the whole "IP exhaustion" point would be moot!
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geotti January 16, 2014
Just to chime in, .de domains require nameservers to be in two different subnets. In addition, use cases with services using standard port are quite common in many scenarios, besides the obvious requirement for PTR records for mailservers. SSL can be worked around, other services can not.

It's simple, really: either allow paying 5 bucks per IP along with a valid reason (instead of an additional droplet), create some pre-configured image (app, you call it here?) with automated internal routing, or loose (who knows how many) clients. Adding IPv6 *might* work along with a proxy for some things too.

For myself, I will have to consider moving more stuff here, I'm just glad I've looked for the additional IP form *before* I logged in and set up the system like so many here.
Your inflexibility on this issue amazes me. If all you want are bloggers, why do you even market to people earning money in this sphere? Your hyped reputation will just implode if you don't sort this out.
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jmish1987 January 22, 2014
People need to realize that hosting your entire DNS on ONE machine in the same datacenter removes the inherit design of redundancy that comes with DNS. DNS is a DOMAIN Name System that is DISTRIBUTED. Having your DNS server on one box and fooling your TLD into thinking its two boxes will leave all your customers/users both websiteless and resolveless and also inherently prohibits you from communicating with your customers should your server fail. Just a bad idea.

That being said (I had to address it), I am also a fan of multiple IP addresses on one Droplet, albeit IPv6. While not a huge requirement for me (Just hosting a small game server and website) it would have been nice to break them out by IP and also have a dedicated IP to manage everything. This might be a major turn off for me...I'd rather go back to spending the additional $20-25 a month for the multiple IP addresses (not to mention the availability of hard drive space) than not have the flexibility.
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pabluski.sanchez February 5, 2014
This cannot be a IPv4 address space issue. If it was then getting an additional droplet would not be a choice. It is either a way to sell more droplets or a fundamental architectural oversight.
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steve141358 February 10, 2014
I was looking at SNI. Can do it with Apache. I also run Jetty and I can't do it with Jetty because Java 7 doesn't support it. But even though I could run nginx or haproxy, a solution I was also looking into, it's a non-starter. SNI does not have wide enough client support.

In my opinion, DigitalOcean is being unbelievably stubborn, not to mention customer-hostile. I don't need more than one ip for non-ssl sites but down the road, I WILL need SSL. And I'm not going to tell my customers "no" just because my hosting provider doesn't feel like giving its customers what MANY of them have been asking for.

I love everything else about the service but *this* issue irritates me. Step up, DO, and do the right thing. I'm willing to pay a few extra bucks/month to get the IP addresses.
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pgcullum February 19, 2014
Not having multiple IPs may make it impossible for me to use DO, but I am a novice and I may misunderstand. I have read in your forum that cPanel requires a separate IP from my main site (and a separate droplet.) Can virtualmin (and webmin), recommended in a help article here, and my WordPress site coexist in the same droplet? If not, can they do inter-droplet communication, so I can manage my site with virtualmin?
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brandon.hahnel March 23, 2014
Oh man. I invest a lot of time on development before I realized you have a one-IP rule. I **completely** understand that eventually this won't be an issue. More an more clients/applications will support multiple SSL certificates over one IP. But it's simply not the case yet. Mission critical business sites simply can't hope that their clients aren't on Windows XP or an older browser.

Sorry Digital Ocean. Maybe I'll come back in a few years.
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thaJeztah March 25, 2014
Following this discussion, I can see some valid remarks here and some (IMO) not so valid;

>"I have some very big sites that I want to host on a droplet, so I need multiple IPs. DigitalOcean must give me those, otherwise I go to another provider..."

If those sites are very important, probably the customer doesn't even *want* to be on a shared server (droplet). Paying a few bucks to have a *dedicated* server should be preferred. And if those sites are business-critical, you should even consider creating multiple droplets in multiple data-centers to guarantee uptime.

>"I need Multple DNS servers for my domain in a separate DNS range"

As mentioned by someone else in this thread; that's not without reason. You *want* multiple servers to guarantee the DNS to work. Putting them on the same server is just asking for trouble.

>"I need to support Windows XP, so cannot use SNI"

THAT (again, IMO) may be a valid point. However, if those sites aren't very heavy on resources, $5.00 per month for a dedicated server isn't very much and does give your customer the additional advantages of extra security and flexibility over a shared hosting environment. ("For that money, you'll get your OWN server!". "Yes, if you want to, I can give you full shell access to your server, just use it wisely")

>"My sites need 6 ip addresses each"

To be honest, I've never seen such a requirement. I'd be interested to know what kind of site requires this

>"I need a PTR for mail to work properly"

Seems like an actual problem.

>"cPanel requires a dedicated IP address"

Apparently many people in this discussion want to offer cPanel to their customers. I'm wondering if cPanel is already working on this requirement as it seems like something that *shouldn't* have to be a hard requirement; I cannot think of a direct technical limitation for cPanel to function correctly on a shared IP. Maybe DigitalOcean should contact the cPanel developers with this question.

>"I want to run a lot of sites on my Droplet so I need more IP addresses"

Running many sites on a single IP address should *not* be a problem (apart from the SSL/SNI and PTR problems). I'm running a bunch of servers that host in the range of 100-150 websites on a single IP-address. Server-load will be a bigger issue than limited IP-addresses.



Having said that, I *DO* think that DigitalOcean should offer ways to assign multiple IP addresses to a Droplet, especially since the still don't offer IPv6 (anno 2014!).

I also realise that IPv4 addresses are limited, so I can imagine that this should be handled by digitalocean support on a per-use case, enabling digitalocean to advise/support the customer in finding alternatives (clearly, not all people are aware of the alternatives and *think* they need an additional IP address)

Simply *denying* the option of having multiple IP-addresses is NOT an option. There *are* many, valid use-cases that *do* require multiple IP-addresses on a server and DigitalOcean should offer ways to realise this.

I really hope that DigitalOcean listens to these remarks and will be flexible. IPv6 should really be their top priority at this moment as well.
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bj March 31, 2014
Come on DigitalOcean - we need extra IP-adress (we will pay for it)
Why is there no solution on this - DO are lossing many business customer
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kier.lightning April 29, 2014
Sorry I don't have time to read all of the responses so sorry if this was posted earlier. but with Apache I was able to run multiple different websites on one ip using Apache virtual hosts. letting me run as many websites as a wish on one ip. so if this is a reason you need more ips, ie. if your a web developer or with to host other peoples sites then you don't need more then one ip.
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phobos May 3, 2014
DigitalOcean. We need multiple IP addresses per host. This is a requirement that most other companies can accomplish.

Why?

1) Not everything is a web host. As a company, you can't expect everybody to need a VPS for a web server.
2) Email servers require a PTR record per domain, if you don't use a proper PTR record then your emails will more than likely end up in junk mail.
3) Other applications like game servers use specific ports that can't be switched around or proxied like you can with HTTP.

There's more than that but you get the idea.

ALLOW FOR MULTIPLE IP ADDRESSES PER HOST.
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me651687 May 5, 2014
You don't need multiple IP's to support multiple domains. Just use UC (Unified Communications aka Subject Alternative Name) SSL certificates, which even IE6 on XP supports.

These allow you to create a single SSL certificate that has multiple domains on.

SSL providers also sometimes support Extended Validation UC certificates as well.
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alexander.arul May 5, 2014
Ok, so I need multiple IPs.

It's obvious now that DO doesn't intend to do anything about it.

From the thread, it seems Linode provides multiple IPs cheaply. Who else do you guys recommend for multiple IPs?
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stratosiii+digitalocean May 20, 2014
I am thinking of migrating here from vpsville but the one IP per VM limitation is preventing me.

I manage my VMs by ssh, for that it has been proven very handy to have a separate IP for two reasons (one optional and one critical):
* I do not want the ssh server to run at the same IP address of the publicly-well-know site that I host.
* At many occasions I find my self behind weird firewalls that only allow traffic from HTTP/HTTPS ports (80, 443) so I need my SSH server to listen to those ports as well.

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williamkehl May 30, 2014
So unfortunate. We'll be moving to azure or rackspace within the next month or so, as we absolutely need multiple IPs. Our system requires calling multiple 3rd party APIs in a polling fashion, and we hit rate limits using just one IP address. This just flat out won't work for us long-term. Wish I would've known about this ridiculous restriction before we purchased our droplet.
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shantanu.bhadoria June 30, 2014

Anyone running a email server for multiple domains will have a issue with the restriction of one IP per droplet. If the reverse lookup on the source server’s IP address doesn’t match the domain name from which the email appears to originate then the mail server automatically gets marked as a spam server by most common email services. seperate IP addresses per domain are absolutely necessary for all the domains from which you hope to send out email.
I was hoping to move my hosting from super expensive The Planet(Orbit/softlayer) to digital ocean but knowing that I can’t purchase additional IPs for the domains I intend to send email from is a big deal breaker. I hope you change this policy.

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shantanu.bhadoria June 30, 2014
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gergely.golovics July 5, 2014

I have an idea to those who want to have multiple IPs per droplet. On your “large” droplet where want to use multiple IP, set up a VPN server. For each additional IP, create a 5$ droplet with a VPN client on it. But I think to use the small droplets’ IPs on the main node, you will have to dst-nat the traffic from the small droplets outside IPs to the main droplet’s private IP inside the virtual private network. It should work, but never tried.

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hutchhare July 24, 2014

buy a vps somewhere else, with an ip subnet, and redirect it over a tunnel.
I play with the other side, i redirect my traffic through a droplet ip address from my router, over a simple gre tunnel, and some iptables command it was.

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info485604 September 11, 2014
[deleted]
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ivanskie November 17, 2014

Not sure if this post is dead or not since September… but it looks like ppl don’t get it.
If some other providers have additional IPv4 address to give out then you guys are lucky.
IPv4 addresses have been running out for a few years, and only last couple years ppl started to freak out about. And yet, ppl still don’t get it.
There are some providers that lucked out, operated for many years, or eaitherway have managed to purchase a substantial IPv4 address block. But when they run out, they’ll have to recycle old ones that ppl canceled. And will not be able to purchase more. Thats it. Its done. IPv4 addresses are done. When they were created people who made them didn’t even believe they’d ever need so many. Well yes. we did. many times more than what we got.
Thats one thing to keep in mind for the people who stumble onto this post in the future, forget about IPv4 addresses, look for IPv6…

Another though..
I see that DO is now offering IPv6 addresses with some of the locations.. It sounds like IPv6 will practically be unlimited per machine, per cell phone,.. per every device ever produced for many years to come…
So.. the question is now, will you be offering multiple IPv6 addresses with droplets? When? or Why not?

Also, you are showing the IPv6 address only once it seems. I got it once in the email when creating the droplet, and if I delete that email, I don’t know of a way to retrieve it again. It’s not visible in the dashboard UI.

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zurrie December 28, 2014

i have research for a while about this issue, seems there is no win-win solution about this…

Google Chrome will mark all HTTP Protocol as insecure begin in 2015, so basically all webmaster need to use HTTPS protocol.

http://thehackernews.com/2014/12/chrome-plans-to-mark-all-http-traffic_88.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheHackersNews+(The+Hackers+News+-+Security+Blog)&_m=3n.009a.793.ug0ao0638r.gj0&linkId=11181316

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RinkuY January 15, 2015

wwwrinku31 1 minute ago

Delegation

Too few IPv4 name servers (1).

Only one IPv4 name server was found for the zone. You should always have at least two IPv4 name servers for a zone to be able to handle transient connectivity problems.

This is also a problem when we use single IP for both name server, can anyone help me?

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dripdrop December 1, 2016

Just wanted to add my two cents: I really need a couple extra IPs. I’m willing to pay. I’m already hosting several sites on Digital Ocean, and I like DO a lot, but I’ll likely migrate to another provider over this issue. I just don’t understand why they can’t provide it.

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tdiesler May 25, 2018

I’m sorry to read that multiple IPs per Droplet are not supported. Currently I have a Droplet per master node as the network requires a unique IP for each. Perhaps you’d like to reconsider your IP allocation scheme - it’d help with blockchain use cases.

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alexdo August 25, 2020

Hello, all

Another thing to mention is the usage of a Floating IPs.

A Floating IP is an IP address that can be instantly moved from one Droplet to another Droplet in the same datacenter.

Part of a highly available infrastructure is being able to immediately point an IP address to a redundant server. This is now possible with the addition of Floating IPs.

Floating IPs are free to use. However, due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses available, if you reserve an address but don’t assign it to a Droplet, we charge $0.006 per hour for each unassigned, reserved IP. (You can relinquish unused IPs from the control panel.) To keep billing simple, you will not be charged unless you accrue $1 or more.

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Alex

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alexdo September 29, 2020

Hello, all

Another thing to mention is the usage of a Floating IPs.

A Floating IP is an IP address that can be instantly moved from one Droplet to another Droplet in the same datacenter.

Part of a highly available infrastructure is being able to immediately point an IP address to a redundant server. This is now possible with the addition of Floating IPs.

Floating IPs are free to use. However, due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses available, if you reserve an address but don’t assign it to a Droplet, we charge $0.006 per hour for each unassigned, reserved IP. (You can relinquish unused IPs from the control panel.) To keep billing simple, you will not be charged unless you accrue $1 or more.

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Alex

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