The economics of a $1 VPS: sharing one IPv4 address across dozens of servers

Why a one-dollar server is possible

Budget hosting provider natbox.io has published a breakdown of why its cheapest virtual private server sells for $1.00 a month. The post, written by Mohammad AlSaraf and dated 12 November 2026, reached the Hacker News front page. The short version: customers on that plan do not get an IPv4 address of their own. They share one public address with dozens of other servers, and that single decision does most of the work of getting the price down.

IPv4 is the expensive part

There are only about 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses, and the pools of unallocated ones ran dry years ago. Since then, addresses have become an asset class that is bought, sold and leased. According to the natbox.io post, broker figures from IPv4Center and IPXO put the average 2026 purchase price at roughly $20 per address, well below the peak of around $45 to $60 seen in 2021 and 2022. Wholesale leases run at about $0.35 to $0.60 per address per month. The post cautions that these numbers vary by broker and by block size, so they should be read as a range rather than a precise market price.

Retail is a different story. natbox.io says its own upstream provider, Contabo, charges €3.50 a month to attach one additional IPv4 address to a VPS. At that rate, a dedicated address would cost several times the price of the entire $1 plan — which is the core of the argument.

How one address serves dozens of servers

Each natbox.io host machine holds a single public IPv4 address, and every server on that machine receives a slice of its port space: 5 ports on the free trial, 10 on the Nano plan, 20 on Box and Box CPU, and 30 on Box Plus. The first port in each block handles SSH, and the remaining ports map through to the same port numbers inside the customer's server. On 9 November 2026, the company's three public addresses were carrying 56, 31 and 14 customer servers respectively. Splitting even Contabo's retail €3.50 across the busiest of those hosts comes to well under 10 cents per server per month.

Ports 80 and 443 cannot be divided this way, since websites expect them at their standard numbers. natbox.io handles those with a proxy: customers link a domain in the client area, and the proxy routes each visitor to the correct server by hostname. The company says the proxy does not decrypt traffic and that it has been load-tested.

What customers give up

The post is candid about the limitations. Over IPv4, SSH lands on an arbitrary port such as 10050 rather than 22, which most software tolerates but a few fixed-port clients, some game clients included, do not. Only the ports in a customer's block are reachable, plus 80 and 443 for linked domains. Outbound mail ports 25, 465 and 587 are blocked for everyone, because a single spammer could get the shared address blocklisted and penalize every other tenant on it. IP reputation is likewise collective: abuse by one customer can affect everyone sharing the address.

IPv6 sidesteps all of this. Every natbox.io server, the free trial included, gets its own routed /80 block with every port open and standard port numbers intact, with no proxy in between. As more of the internet speaks IPv6, the shared IPv4 address matters progressively less.

The post also draws a line around the target audience: if you need a full IPv4 address with every port, a NAT VPS is the wrong tool. For a bot, a small website, a VPN, a monitoring tool or a learning environment, sharing an address is what makes the price possible.

Why it matters

Anyone comparing VPS or cloud pricing is, often without noticing, comparing IPv4 allocation strategies. The address is frequently the largest per-server cost at the low end of the market, and NAT-based plans are the industry's way of amortizing it across tenants. This explainer makes those mechanics explicit: it shows where the price floor of small servers comes from, what functionality you trade away for it, and why IPv6 adoption quietly rewrites the cost structure. For buyers, the checklist is simple — if you need a dedicated IPv4 with all ports, or you want to send mail, a NAT VPS will disappoint. For everything else, it is a bargain with clearly documented trade-offs.