Reserved IP Features

A DigitalOcean Reserved IP address is a publicly-accessible static IP address that you can assign to a Droplet and then reassign to another Droplet later, as needed. You can implement a failover mechanism with reserved IPs to build a high availability infrastructure.

Note
The Floating IP service is now called Reserved IPs. The Reserved IP service retains the same functionality as the prior service.

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

You can use reserved IPs to create server infrastructures without single points of failure, but a reserved 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 reserved IP to a passive server.

Animated active/passive diagram

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