Why Bother Picking Specific IP Addresses?

Technology Blog

Of the many Internet Protocol (IP) address choices out there, why do some people, businesses, and other groups search for specific IP addresses? In some cases it's an issue of organizational ease, while many network engineers seek to avoid problematic IP addresses that could spell doom for traffic. Here are a few reasons that drive discerning network planners to choose (or avoid) specific addresses.

Bad Traffic And Internet Wars

Getting a new IP address out of the large sea of addresses is usually not a problem, but it's not unheard of to get an address that's in the middle of a disorganized internet war.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, ping attacks, or general harassment towards the IP address can happen if your address' previous owner was in a particularly nasty conflict with a hacker or other nefarious internet party. The reason can be as petty as arguing over online games such as multiplayer Minecraft, attacking popular game streamers, or a major part of corporate warfare.

If it sounds like something straight out of a cyberpunk story, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. The attacks aren't rare, but lingering attacks are hard to find and terrible to deal with unless you have the right tools. Most sophisticated attackers won't bother attacking the address when they notice that the address has been offline or switched to a different geographical location, but a truly vindictive hacker may set a long-term attack for the sake of making anyone suffer.

For this reason, many experienced administrators will look up the address information before purchasing. Don't purchase an address sight unseen; find out if it's on a blacklist, or the recipient of heavy traffic by asking the address broker beforehand.

Easy Memorization And Planning

A big part of networking is understanding how everything connects, and often without physical cables. In addition to visual aids, an IP address that is easy to remember can be a huge help to a network administrator.

It's mostly just convenient and nice to look at for small businesses or individual users, but large corporations may want easy to remember address for keeping an easy chart for multiple locations. Although trained network engineers are expected to handle much more difficult configuration tasks, it doesn't hurt to have addresses that have large blocks of numbers that have repetition.

This means addresses with multiple doubles, such as 122.55.118.22, or repeating a theme across each octets like 172.72.172.72. It can be difficult to grab such IP addresses, but if you have time to wait, they're sure to pop up.

Contact an IPv4 broker to track down the daily IPv4 market price, or to check the status of available IP addresses and the IPv4 market price for traffic or blacklist concerns.

18 September 2017