Bit of a strange question I know but what is the deal with IP's? I know what an IP address is but keep seeing posts about them being in short supply and that they are getting harder to aquire. So how can there be a point when we run out of IP's? or am I just not reading such posts right?
There are only a set number of IP addresses available. The current version that we all know and love (IPv4) is limited to 4,294,967,296 IP addresses. Due to misuse (particularly all this SEO crap that doesn't do anything) and just plain general usage, they are quickly running out. We're moving to IPv6 now, which contains so many IPs, we won't know what to do with them all. There are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IP addresses available with IPv6. It's 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses (the correct term is undecillion, ROFL), or as appeared in a Microsoft article, "6.6 x 10²³ addresses for every square meter of the Earth’s surface." That's a lot of addresses. It's so many addresses that in theory, we should never run out. Unfortunately, not all the routers, network equipment, etc. are ready for the change. We're getting there though.
The adoptation of IPV6 has been quite slow, but I think it is beginning to be gradually in use as IPV4 supply dry up.
Some hosts are already moving forward with the policy of, you must have a SSL cert in order to be provided a dedicated IP with shared hosting. Hostgator has already started this policy, I believe that it will be a policy that all hosts will soon have to follow very soon as well. I actually believe it is a very good idea. I know that people will reply, not really because of SEO reasons. Truly, I have never used this tactic for SEO, and have 3 domains that share the same IP and are at the top of the search for my targeted keywords. The only thing that I see most of the days is, just spam blogs using these dedicated IP for false hope of Google traffic.