What is the least expensive way to obtain 1,000s of public IP addresses?

What is the least expensive way to obtain 1,000s of public IP addresses?

I'm needing to serve secure (https) pages for 1,000s of SSL certificates, and need a separate IP address for each SSL cert.

So, I'm looking for the most economic means of doing so.

Go to your local RIR (IANA, APNIC, RIPE etc) and ask for some provider independent ip space. The minimum allocation currently is a /22 (1024 ip addresses), this will be cheaper than getting it from an isp. I'd also suggest getting an AS number while you are at it.

Do you need IPv4 addresses?

It should be relatively straightforward to use IPv6 addresses and IPv6 security features as an alternative to SSL on IPv4. Is that an option for people/hosts using these 1000s of unique services? There are a number of potential issues at the client, ISP, gateway, and application, but IPv6 may provide the alternative to some if not all of the 1000s of standard IP addresses that you are going to spend a lot of time and money on.

So, overall, I've really got to agree with William's answer of "hey, what about IPv6?"....

Essentially, you're talking about at least a /22, and maybe bigger. When you say "least expensive", you really mean "wow, I'm going to hemorrhage money".

Please, describe what you're trying to do. There may be another, better, way that doesn't involve insanely large amounts of IP addresses.

I'm the Loryn who asked the initial question. Although, seeing it was migrated here by someone else, I can't see how to edit the question.

TomTom has provided a partial solution for this question, for some of my customers.

Matt Simons asked for more information:

My company is developing a shared hosting infrastructure for commercial websites. We'll be serving thousands of transactional websites from a common infrastructure. For one class of customers, we've been intending to use wildcard certs to provide SSL. For another class of customers (those who provide their own SSL certs), we're trying to figure out the most cost effective means of providing SSL services using their own domain names.