Floating IPs

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

5 May 2021

• We have updated the Floating IP API responses to better align with our newer API models. The droplet and region fields now use the same response models used in the /v2/droplets and /v2/regions endpoints. Specifically:

  • The private_networking feature is now displayed under the features field under droplet instead of the features field under region.
  • The vpc_uuid field now populates with the correct values.
  • The Droplet’s type displays base when the Droplet uses a base image (i.e. Ubuntu, CentOS).
  • The Droplet’s networks field now includes private and floating IP addresses, if applicable.

  Example Response:

  {
    "floating_ips": [
      {
        "ip": "144.126.248.39",
        "droplet": {
          "id": 228430424,
          "name": "ubuntu-s-1vcpu-1gb-nyc3-01",
          "memory": 1024,
          "vcpus": 1,
          "disk": 25,
          "locked": false,
          "status": "active",
          "kernel": null,
          "created_at": "2021-01-26T16:55:51Z",
          "features": [
            "private_networking"
          ],
          ...
          "networks": {
            "v4": [
              {
                "ip_address": "192.20.2.55",
                "netmask": "255.255.0.0",
                "gateway": "",
                "type": "private"
              },
              {
                "ip_address": "192.127.2.2",
                "netmask": "255.255.240.0",
                "gateway": "161.35.176.1",
                "type": "public"
              }
            ],
            "v6": []
          },
          "region": {
            "name": "New York 3",
            "slug": "nyc3",
            "features": [
              "backups",
              "ipv6",
              "metadata",
              "install_agent",
              "storage",
              "image_transfer",
              "server_id",
              "management_networking"
            ],
            "available": true,
            "sizes": [
            ...
            ]
          },
          "tags": [],
          "vpc_uuid": "21e31e10-24c5-47ec-8ae6-98da22"
        },
        ...
  }
  

  We have truncated the response for readability.

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.

For more information, see all Floating IPs release notes.