Originally Posted by Phil21
Haha.. another thread I shouldn't comment on.
Anyways, I'll try to stick to the facts.
#1. Hosting providers pay for IP's. This is a yearly maintenance fee (non-issue, $100), and an initial setup fee. ARIN's fee schedule is well known and published, so you can look this up yourself. The intial "setup fee" for a decent sized provider will be $4500, for up to a /16 of IP space (65534 IP's). However, due to the way ARIN allocates IP's you will typically be paying these initial setup fees as you grow, so it's somewhat more than what it looks like.
#2. Hosting providers pay for IP's in non-directly related expenses. This includes network complexity increases as space grows, creating coherent means to track IP allocations, and probably the most important - combining the above into reporting mechanisms in order to justify more IP space from ARIN (generally, for most providers, an extremely time consuming and annoying process). These costs vary from place to place of course, but I will make the leap of faith that no matter what provider - these costs far outweigh the relatively trivial ARIN expenses.
#3. More of a take on #2 - providers must make certain that they are allocating IP space per ARIN guidelines. Should they not, they will be unable to obtain further space. Since ARIN allocates space based on a 6 month usage projection, and assuming the provider is not gaming the system, this creates a HUGE problem and impedement to growth, moreso the smaller the provider (as 80% usage of a small number of IP's leaves FAR less space available during the application process than 80% usage of a huge number).
So.. providers SHOULD charge a small fee for space usage in on way or another. Some providers elect to charge per-IP (many in an effort to keep space use down, unrelated to "making bank" on said IP fees), and some simply build in cost in their product offerings for most average customers.
We (Reflected Networks) are somewhat the latter. IP's we see as a cost of doing business, and since our systems are fairly well integrated by now, as we've been around quite some time, they cost us much less in time and effort to keep track of. This translates into our policy of "free" IP's up to 256 for any dedicated customers, and after the initial /24 (256 IP's) we charge a $14.95/mo maintenance fee per /24 of usage. This policy generally means for 95% of our customer base IP's are provided at no extra charge. The other 5% generally are folks with /20 allocations or more.
Also, our policy of assigning IP's is that you can have one IP per site *if requested*. Currently, ARIN policy states that a domain name is ample justification for an IP's worth of usage - but you have to provide a reason why you're not using name based virtual hosting. Generally, obviously, this reason is almost always "SEO purposes". I could argue the merits of "multiple class C's!!!!!" being actually useful in SEO, but in our business the client is always right, and gets what they want :) Should ARIN policy change, and they have made rumblings of revisiting this policy area, we will obviously have to follow it (as will every other host in America, should they want to have IP's down the road).
So in summary. Yes, your host has direct and indirect costs involved with giving you additional IP's. Yes, some hosts use this as a profit center, some hosts do not. No, it is not likely a "huge money grab", and generally is a way to attempt to keep IP demand down. As always, find the host that bets fits *YOUR* needs!
-Phil
|
