How to get your Own IP address for business

IP addresses are the identity of your machine, if some one needs to talk with you on the internet, He/She need to have your IP address

An IP address is always allocated by the internet service providers, when some one connects to the internet. Though this IP address allocation is temporary, as soon as the user get disconnected the allocation get expired and on reconnect there is no guarantee that the user will get again the same IP address as it was allocated before.

This whole concept of temporary allocation known as dynamic allocation of IP addresses or dynamic IP address, the vise versa is static IP address, in static IP addressing an IP address is bind to a user name or with an internet connection, so either the user is always on with the static IP address or every time he/she will connect to the Internet, will get the same IP address.

For normal internet activity, such as serving, or for using facebook, hub pages you don’t need to have a static IP address as the temporary IP address is unique and at the moment of connection it is the identity of your machine, on reconnection a new identity will given to your machine and the user will feel no difference in his/her internet activities.

But what if someone needs to run a web server or planned to hosting a website, or a mail server E.t.c . For this all the temporary IP or dynamic allocation from the internet service provider isn’t enough.

He/she must have to get a permanent IP address, so the identity of the machine will never change and the user can reach to the machine with the same IP address always.

Now the question is How to get your own IP address, and the answer is contact your service provider. There are different packages available for IP addresses blocks. The minimum block or chunk the service provider will provide to you is consisting of 4 IP addresses pools with 255.255.255.252 mask. Out of it two IPs are usable one will be given to your machine, and second will be the IP address of the port of the router/CPE (in case of DSL, wimax E.t.c), and the rest two is use for network identification (First IP) and the broadcast IP for the pool (last IP).

The price for the pool is different in different countries and its depends on the service providers the price for the chunk is separate then the internet line rent. Your internet connection (CPE, Modem) will still have the dynamic IP addresses but the machines behind the router, CPE and modem will have the live static IP addresses.

The second way is to get your internet connection with a static IP address; a lot of service providers will provide you the static IP address packages with a DSL or any other connections.

In this type of connection you doesn’t need to buy a chunk of IP addresses from your service provider, you can perform NAT or PAT to perform the conversion of IP addresses at your router or CPE to get all your machines or server behind the router and CPE.

In this the desired machine will use the Static IP address of the connection. This solution is cheaper but need knowledge of the concepts of NAT and PAT to execute this.

Finally if someone don’t want to buy an IP address from the internet service provider, and would like to purchase it directly from the ICANN, APNIC, or ARIN E.t.c. then he/she will have to purchase a big chunk of ips, normally it the cost per IP will be little less then your service provider, but the overall cost will be a lot as the pool you will purchase have lot of IP addresses. Normally internet service providers buy the IPs from these organizations.

Both ways for obtain a permanent IP addresses for your machine is good with their own pros and cost and it very much depends on the money and the requirements, and how big setup you are going to deploy. For a single small scale service you can use a static IP with NAT option, you can save the cost in this way but there will be no contingency for this type of solution as if the internet service goes down your live IP services will also down, whereas if you purchase an IP pool and route this with different service providers you will have back up in case of your primary link down and more importantly you can have contingency plans for your services.

Another drawback of the static IP solution from the service provider with the NAT option which I practically face is NAT sessions, if the router or device which is performing Nat on the edge have less memory and more sessions will obviously results into fill up the memory space with NAT sessions and the NAT device will be hanged. Then you will have to either clear the NAT session or will have to restart the device. That’s why I will recommend the purchase of IP pool for the services you want to provide.