Creating Multiple IPs from Owning/Renting a Server

[Emporium]

I LOVE 24vc and have been using them for a while but I feel like I may be throwing away money. I have heard estimates that 24vc's profit margins are as high as 95% but I doubt it is this much. Nevertheless, they are by far the best provider for those with a small number of accounts and I don't mean to take away any of their business but before I start spending north of $100 per month on their services I would like to know whether there are other options. I have heard that leasing a server can allow hundreds of dedicated IPs but I do not know how this works exactly. Is anybody familiar with this or does anyone have a good way to run multiple IPs reliably? Thanks

[LSD]

There are some VPS providers which give 2-20 ips, even more for some extra payment along with the VPS. You can try them.
But problem is you never know which of the ips are abused before.

[123]

Ha 95%, not even in my dreams… Couldn’t be more wrong, there’s a reason why no other VPN company offers truly fresh dedicated ips, because quite frankly put it’s just not a great business model. It’s not very profitable at all, we actually lost money overall our first few years until we got better at being more efficient and adjusted our pricing to encourage longer subscriptions, and it’s not easy, its hard to manage, because the expenses are huge and so are recurring expenses especially when compared to the regular VPN business model.

Just to give you a taste of what I’m talking about on top of having to pay for resource heavy dedicated servers monthly you have to acquire large quantities of high quality dedicated ips that have never been used for sites like amazon, ebay, paypal etc which that alone is not easy to find, especially now that ARIN has run out of ipv4 addresses, and then on top of that they come at a hefty price and then you have to continue to pay for this batch of fresh ips monthly no matter what. Even if the customer cancels the Fresh IP after just the first month, you have to continue to pay for that ip for possibly years to come because you can’t cancel one Fresh IP without canceling the whole batch. And all that is without even beginning to mention website expenses, hiring support reps, getting VPN software coded & designed, etc etc the list goes on and on...

There is a reason why 99% of VPN companies just reissue the same ips over and over again, because 1 its expensive to acquire new fresh ips and 2 its even more expensive to let hundreds of ips that are canceled sit dormant doing nothing and not making any money off them just losing money, like we have to do because we can’t reissue used ips because they’re no longer fresh and we only issue fresh ips.

But anyways, my long rant aside… getting a dedicated server is not as practical and useful as you would think. Even if you get one at a good price and find one that has decent ips, there still going to be sequential ips which is not very helpful. By that I mean, lets say you order 32 ips from a company, they’re going to give you ips like this:

100.10.100.100
100.10.100.101
100.10.100.102
100.10.100.103

And lets just say it’s probably not the best idea to open 30 accounts with all your ips looking like that... If you’re strapped for cash you would be much better off buying a couple cheap VPS from many different companies (so you get variation between ips). You would have to do trial and error of course to see which VPS companies ips are abused and no good but eventually you would find a couple good ones that you can order from, and potentially save some money

[MLADen]

Originally Posted by Emporium

I LOVE 24vc and have been using them for a while but I feel like I may be throwing away money. I have heard estimates that 24vc's profit margins are as high as 95% but I doubt it is this much. Nevertheless, they are by far the best provider for those with a small number of accounts and I don't mean to take away any of their business but before I start spending north of $100 per month on their services I would like to know whether there are other options. I have heard that leasing a server can allow hundreds of dedicated IPs but I do not know how this works exactly. Is anybody familiar with this or does anyone have a good way to run multiple IPs reliably? Thanks

I lol'd at this. While maintaining a single IP and VPN server might not be super expensive, selling them on retail basis to customers who demand top quality both in terms of IP cleanliness and customer support is what makes it costly. This business needs sheer volume to be profitable and ebay sellers cannot provide this volume.

[phaz0rz]

Very cool to get some insight into how 24vc operates. Many of my questions about their operation have now been answered, lol.

[Emporium]

Originally Posted by 123

Ha 95%, not even in my dreams… Couldn’t be more wrong, there’s a reason why no other VPN company offers truly fresh dedicated ips, because quite frankly put it’s just not a great business model. It’s not very profitable at all, we actually lost money overall our first few years until we got better at being more efficient and adjusted our pricing to encourage longer subscriptions, and it’s not easy, its hard to manage, because the expenses are huge and so are recurring expenses especially when compared to the regular VPN business model.

Just to give you a taste of what I’m talking about on top of having to pay for resource heavy dedicated servers monthly you have to acquire large quantities of high quality dedicated ips that have never been used for sites like amazon, ebay, paypal etc which that alone is not easy to find, especially now that ARIN has run out of ipv4 addresses, and then on top of that they come at a hefty price and then you have to continue to pay for this batch of fresh ips monthly no matter what. Even if the customer cancels the Fresh IP after just the first month, you have to continue to pay for that ip for possibly years to come because you can’t cancel one Fresh IP without canceling the whole batch. And all that is without even beginning to mention website expenses, hiring support reps, getting vpn software coded & designed, etc etc the list goes on and on...

There is a reason why 99% of VPN companies just reissue the same ips over and over again, because 1 its expensive to acquire new fresh ips and 2 its even more expensive to let hundreds of ips that are canceled sit dormant doing nothing and not making any money off them just losing money, like we have to do because we can’t reissue used ips because they’re no longer fresh and we only issue fresh ips.

But anyways, my long rant aside… getting a dedicated server is not as practical and useful as you would think. Even if you get one at a good price and find one that has decent ips, there still going to be sequential ips which is not very helpful. By that I mean, lets say you order 32 ips from a company, they’re going to give you ips like this:

100.10.100.100
100.10.100.101
100.10.100.102
100.10.100.103

And lets just say it’s probably not the best idea to open 30 accounts with all your ips looking like that... If you’re strapped for cash you would be much better off buying a couple cheap VPS from many different companies (so you get variation between ips). You would have to do trial and error of course to see which VPS companies ips are abused and no good but eventually you would find a couple good ones that you can order from, and potentially save some money

I completely understand that your profit is probably nowhere close to your gross margins. The items that I sell on eBay on average cost me $2 each and sell for $20 each leaving me with 90% gross margins but after my ~$5,000 a month in overhead I still lose money some months. I don't know much about your business but I would imagine that if you didn't have to deal with customers on a retail level and only had to deal with "internal sales" within your own organization things would be much simpler and many expenses could be eliminated. This is what I was thinking about doing; NOT offering my service to the public. I don't quite know how to get fresh IPs or create a VPN or any of that so I would need to hire someone from another forum to help. I would imagine that finding non-sequential IPs would be take some searching and that is definitely something that I didn't think of so I appreciate the insight.

P.S. I'm not sure whether you realize it or not but you kind of have a monopoly as far as aspkin is concerned and I would imagine that they are most of your business, I appreciate your pricing being affordable but to be honest if you are not profitable enough you could totally charge double and I think most people would find a way to afford it.
Thanks so much for your comment btw; I loved hearing about your business!

Originally Posted by MLADen

I lol'd at this. While maintaining a single IP and VPN server might not be super expensive, selling them on retail basis to customers who demand top quality both in terms of IP cleanliness and customer support is what makes it costly. This business needs sheer volume to be profitable and ebay sellers cannot provide this volume.

I wanted to maintain multiple IPs on a server WITHOUT selling them on a retail basis. This would be an internal service within my company to allow us to more quickly and cost effectively create new accounts.

[TGMT²]

Originally Posted by 123

Ha 95%, not even in my dreams…

Insightful and interesting. Thanks for that.

[Emporium]

Originally Posted by TGMT²

Insightful and interesting. Thanks for that.

I think he means that it isn't close to 95% after all expenses (duh) but it would be interesting to hear the actual gross margins before factoring in all of the other expenses. I would guess it is about 75% but it could be as high as 95% from some of the numbers I've seen.

[MLADen]

Originally Posted by Emporium

I wanted to maintain multiple IPs on a server WITHOUT selling them on a retail basis. This would be an internal service within my company to allow us to more quickly and cost effectively create new accounts.

yep I understand this. The difference between you and 24vc is they can actually buy IP ranges. For you buying IP ranges would make no sense economically.

Large dedicated server with multiple IPs attached to it would make no sense either because all IPs would be in the same subnet. E.g. 100.101.102.X, where X is the only part that would differ between IP addresses.

Your best bet is to buy multiple low-budget VPS servers ($2-5/month) with 1 ip/each, setup a proxy on them and test how each IP works for your purpose. Eliminate (and possibly refund) those with bad IPs. Rinse, repeat.

Because many other people are doing the same, the higher the price of VPS, the greater chances of getting a clean IP. So realistic price is somewhere around $3-4 per IP per month.

In 2-2,5 weeks I will publish a guide describing how to set everything up from A to Z.