The IPv4 world ought to end, because the addresses have run out and no more are coming. But end users still need them, and supplies are dwindling.
IPv4 addresses have run out globally, and the individual RIRs now allocate them in very limited quantities. In Europe, RIPE NCC allocates at most 1024 addresses from its last range to any one organization, and never any more. Some time ago, we became an LIR, a member of RIPE NCC, and received our final block.
If you look at our list of address ranges, you will see that some of our addresses were also allocated by our datacenter, Master Internet. Another range was donated by a friendly company that was closing down. It also had its own LIR and merged it with ours.
Incidentally, that is the best kind of sponsorship. If you have unused addresses lying around, we would be happy to have them. ☺
At present, we have a total of 2256 IPv4 addresses across all these ranges. But our servers already run almost 1200 VPSes, some with more than one address.
Most members (719) have one address; 95 members have two, 17 have three, and the numbers fall very quickly after that. The two members with the most have 6 and 7 addresses. That leaves us with approximately 1000 available addresses. But since we are growing very quickly, that supply will shrink.
Of course, we also have our own IPv6 ranges, with about 79 octillion addresses. Those should last us a while. Our entire infrastructure is IPv6-ready, of course, and we use it, as do many of our members.
The situation is that service providers have had IPv6 deployed for many years (some for a decade), while access providers are holding things up. The problem does not really bother them yet: things work for users, and if there is a problem, they simply buy a bigger NAT. So we too still have to support IPv4, and our servers cannot do without the dwindling supply of addresses.
At some point, we will have to buy another range instead of a new server. It is not cheap at all. Prices on the open market are around 10 dollars per address, with a minimum block size of 1024 addresses.
Switch to IPv6!