Is It Possible To Buy Your Own IP Address?

I was curious to find out if anyone knew whether it was possible to buy an ip address directly instead of 'leasing' one from a hosting company and, if so, what the process involved?

Regards,

Lee

You can buy IP's directly from ARIN, but you have to not only pay but justify the need. We worked with our host to buy a class C and it wasn't too difficult but this was a couple of years back and IP's are more scarce so I've heard they are a little more stringent nowadays. Here is their website:
http://www.arin.net/index.shtml

If i could ask...

How did you 'justify' the need for your own IP?

Was it something as simple as saying your site was well branded and needed to have a dedicated IP address for tech related issues or was there more needed than that?

Regards,

Lee

You don't buy, you lease. And justification is anything that requires its own unique IP address, such as nameservers or ssl certificate sites or running an ISP. I am sure they have it all listed on their site at http://www.arin.net

cheers,
Luke

the other thing is, you can't lease one IP address. You have to lease a whole block, and I think the minimum that ARIN will assign is in the thousands. So to justify, you'd have to show that you will have a minimum number of devices that require individual IPs such as web servers, DNS servers, mail servers, etc.

Basically unless you're a really large company with hundreds of employees and lots of servers, or you're an ISP reselling services to customers, it would be hard to get ARIN to justify an allocation.

Some ISPs will sub-delegate a small block of IPs to one customer, but they would show up as the primary "owner" of the main block and you as the "owner" of the sub-block.

And of course, reverse DNS (available to everyone) will show the IP address as reversing to whatever you set it up as (company name, server name, or, if you're doing individual-IP-per-site, site name.) It all depends on what you're trying to do.