Do You Need a Dedicated IP? What a VPS Gives You by Default

What you get by default

One public IPv4 per server, yours for the life of that server. Nobody else answers on it. You can point a domain at it, run a mail server on it, set a PTR record for it, and it does not change while the machine exists.

This is what separates a VPS from shared hosting, where hundreds of sites answer on one address and your reputation is the average of theirs.

"Dedicated" is not the same as "clean"

IPv4 addresses are recycled. The address you get today belonged to somebody else last month, and possibly to somebody careless.

That matters in three specific places:

• Email. If a previous tenant sent spam from it, the address may sit on blocklists, and your mail is quietly filtered before anyone reads it. This is the single most common unpleasant surprise with a fresh server.
• Rate limits and captchas. Some services score whole ranges. A datacenter address can be treated as suspicious regardless of its history — which is why a VPN endpoint sometimes sees more captchas, not fewer.
• Reputation services. A handful of commercial lists mark entire datacenter ranges as "hosting", and some sites act on that.

Checking takes a minute and is worth doing before you build anything on the address:

# your address
curl -s https://api.ipify.org; echo

# does it resolve backwards the way you expect?
dig -x <your-ip> +short

Then look it up on a couple of public blocklist checkers. If it is listed for something you did not do, the fix is usually to get a different address rather than to argue.

What your IP reveals

Less than people fear, and more than people expect.

It reveals the datacenter, the city and the provider — that is public registry data and it is not hideable. It does not reveal your name, and if you rented the server without an identity check, the registry points at the host, not at you.

What it does do is link everything that uses it. Two services on one address are visibly the same operator. If that matters to your setup, the answer is two servers, not cleverness on one.

For the rest of what a host knows about you regardless of the address, see the longer piece on what "no logs" can actually mean.

When to change the address

Three honest reasons:

1. You inherited a dirty one. Blocklisted on arrival, and mail or an API is suffering for it.
2. The address itself attracted attention — a sustained scan, an attack, or a service that decided it does not like you.
3. You want to separate two things that are currently linked by sharing one address.

On our servers this is a rotation: the machine keeps its disk and its data, and comes back on a new address. It is not a rebuild, and you do not reinstall anything. The trade is a short downtime and the DNS propagation that follows.

What it is not: a way to escape consequences. Abuse reports follow the account, not the address.

IPv6, briefly

We hand out IPv4 only right now. IPv6 is switched off at provisioning on every backend, so there is no dual-stack address and no /64 to attach. If your workload requires IPv6, this is the honest place to find that out rather than after deployment.