Is there a global shortage of IP addresses or not? [closed]

Solution 1:

No, DreamHost is not giving you 2 IPv4 address just for fun. Notice their Unique IP is a separate option with a cost. You are sharing non-unique IPs, possibly with thousands of other sites. They can't possibly host a million web sites on a hundred thousand IPs unless some shared. Even that is relatively rich because they were an early adopter. A new hosting provider starting today can't get v4 from ARIN anymore.

Bad analogy time. IPv4 addresses are a "product" the manufacturer "stopped making" (IANA ran out). The regional "warehouses" (RIR pools) are also out of stock. And you can only get the "vendor" to talk to you about a plan to upgrade (the last slivers are reserved for IPv6 transition).

You have not noticed the impact of the exhaustion because of enormous effort by network operators to conserve ever smaller and fragmented subnets. Named based virtual hosts, NATs, transfers on the resale market. It is astonishing the internet still works with this technical debt.

IPv6 is a solution you can implement today. It has the address space to meet global needs, like the next 10 billion IP devices. It is not feasible to make v6 compatible with v4, a 32 bit field does not fit a 128 bit value. Because getting the entire planet to do a cutover date seems very unlikely, we are in a transition period. For the foreseeable future, v6 will be the network, and v4 will be a legacy service if needed.

Compare to the transition of telephones from local named exchanges to national all number plans. That took a few decades, but now you can direct dial almost anywhere in the world. Eventually, IPv4 will seem as quaint as a 4 digit phone number.