Purchasing IP addresses

[toonarific]

Are there any companies that outright sell IP addresses, so that no matter where a business moves, or whoever they use for the ISP, they dont have to keep changing IP addresses?

[Sathish]

>no matter where a business moves

IP address is very closely bound to geographical location.

[SEOMike]

If you want an IP, find a good host and stick to them. We host sites for companies all over the nation. It doesn't matter if they move, we're still here.

Sure can be a pain to change IPs huh?

[toonarific]

I host my own site on my server, since my site is in the 6gig range right now, with many more coming. Thats why I was trying to see if I could find 1 IP, so it can follow me wherever I go

[scgallafent]

You're probably not big enough to get an IP address that will move with you. There are network routing issues involved.

That's the reason we have DNS. Why can't you just use DNS and be done with it?

[toonarific]

Well, how would I use DNS?

[upside]

What scgallafent means is that you could get a domain name. The DNS (Domain Name System) is what associates domains with IP addresses. Once you have a domain and DNS setup, an IP change is trivial and need not involve downtime.

[blaze]

if you just have one server, he's right it's not really an issue.

However, yes, you can purchase a range of IP addresses and no they are not bound to geographical location.

This is a useful thing to do as it makes it easier to move and savvy hosting customers that have 100+ ip addresses sometimes will purchase the range so that when they move they don't to renumber routers/firewalls/applications/etc and deal with DNS propegation nightmares.

Another thing to do is use internal IP addresses however this doesn't always work as sometimes your new host might have incompatibility issues. But they can have them with external IP addresses as well.

Anyways, really, 1 IP address - don't bother.

[scgallafent]

Even if you've got 100 servers, you are probably not going to be allocated your own block of IP addresses. You would have to justify needing at least a couple of hundred addresses and you also have to have the network connectivity to make it work. Your DSL or cable modem doesn't qualify as the proper network connectivity.

That's one of a few reasons the DNS system exists. That and it's a lot easier to remember www.webmasterworld.com than 64.33.51.156.

Here's how the system works:

1) You register a domain name

2) You set up DNS entries on a DNS server for that domain name

3) You set up the DNS server information at the domain registrar

4) John Smith decides to go to www.example.com

5) His computer asks his ISP's DNS server for the IP address for www.example.com

6) The ISP's DNS server asks the root DNS servers which DNS servers are authoritative for example.com

7) The ISP's DNS server asks the authoritative DNS servers what the IP address is for www.example.com

8) The ISP's DNS server gives that response back to John Smith's computer

9) John Smith's computer requests the web page from your server (by IP address)

There are two routes you can take to get this to work:

1) Register your own domain name

This isn't that expensive. It will cost you $7-40 per year depending on who you register the name with.

I'm going to suggest namecheap.com. The price is pretty good and they've got their own DNS servers, so you can set up the DNS information directly and not have to worry about getting someone to provide DNS services. (I'm assuming that this machine is in your house and not hosted by a web hosting company.)

If your IP address changes very rarely (fixed IP or a cable modem), you can set up an A record with the IP address and be done. If the IP address changes, you update the A record.

If your IP address changes frequently, you can use NameCheap's dynamic DNS client. You run a program on your computer that watches for the IP address to change. Whenever the IP address changes, it sends a request to the NameCheap server to update the address in the A record.

Either way, when someone requests www.imawebdude.com, they go get the IP address from the DNS server and find your computer. If the IP address changes, they get the new IP address when they request it from the DNS server.

Pretty nifty, eh?

2) If you don't want to register a domain, you can get a subdomain from someone like dyndns.org. After you set up an account with them, you can register something like mydomain.dyndns.org and the process works exactly the same way. This option is free.

[blaze]

For network engineers who have setup infrastructures with 20+ boxes, each with dual ip appresses for failover and another IP for data backup (so as not to overload the primary connection), justifying 100+ addresses is both trivial and necessary.