Floating IPs

Validated on 1 March 2021 • Posted on 19 June 2018

DigitalOcean floating IPs are publicly-accessible static IP addresses that you can assign to Droplets and instantly remap between other Droplets in the same datacenter. Implement a failover mechanism with floating IPs to build a high availability infrastructure.

Plans and Pricing

Floating IPs are free when assigned to a Droplet.

Floating IPs cost $4/month (roughly $0.006/hour) when reserved but not assigned to a Droplet, due to the shortage of available IPv4 addresses. You are not billed unless you accrue $1 or more per floating IP.

Regional Availability

Floating IPs are available in all datacenters. They are region-specific resources and can only be assigned to Droplets within the same datacenter.

Features

Floating IPs let you redirect network traffic between any of your Droplets within the same datacenter. Assigning a floating IP to a Droplet doesn’t replace or change its original public IP address.

You can use floating IPs to create server infrastructures without single points of failure, but a floating IP alone does not automatically provide high availability. For a setup to be highly available, you need to implement a failover mechanism to automate the process of detecting failures of the active server and reassigning the floating IP to a passive server.

You can manage floating IPs with the API for automatic reassignment.

Limits

By default, you can reserve three floating IPs per account. If you reach this limit, you can request more through the control panel.
Floating IPs cannot be assigned to more than one Droplet at a time.
Floating IPs do not support PTR (rDNS) records.
We do not support IPv6 floating IPs. All floating IPs are IPv4.
We do not support floating IPs for DigitalOcean Kubernetes worker nodes.
A Droplet must have an anchor IP before you can assign a floating IP to it. Droplets created after October 20, 2015 automatically have an anchor IP, and you can create an anchor IP on older Droplets.
Floating IPs do not support SMTP traffic.

Latest Updates

15 May 2020

Unassigned floating IP charges will now appear on invoices. The first charge will appear on July 2020 invoices for all floating IPs that were not assigned to Droplets during the month of June.

19 August 2019

Floating IP Address rate limit information was added to the DigitalOcean API Documentation.

11 June 2018

Expanded Droplet View allows customers using the Dashboard to click on a Droplet and quickly view additional information about the Droplet without having to go to the Droplet Page. It also updates the list of Droplets to display at a glance whether Backups are on/off and if a Floating IP is attached.

For more information, see all Floating IPs release notes.