On a shared IP, you and many other customers of the VPN service leave the server with the same address. On a dedicated IP, the address is assigned to you alone. Shared is the default and the better choice for privacy, because your activity is mixed with everyone else's. Dedicated is the better choice when services need to recognize you consistently: banking that dislikes changing addresses, remote access to systems that allow only known IPs, or simply fewer captchas. The trade is anonymity for reputation.

How shared IPs work

A VPN server has one or a few public addresses, and every customer connected to it appears to the internet with those. Hundreds of people, one address. Websites see the address and know from databases that it belongs to a data center and is probably a VPN.

Advantages: your traffic cannot be told apart from other users' by address alone; the address changes when you switch servers; nothing about the address is tied to you. Disadvantages: the address may carry a bad reputation from other users, so sites show captchas, block sign-ups, or flag logins; and some services refuse data-center ranges outright.

How dedicated IPs work

The provider assigns you an address that only your connections use, usually in a location you choose. To the internet it still looks like a data-center address, but its history is your history alone.

Advantages: consistent identity for services that watch for address changes; a clean reputation you control; the ability to add the address to allowlists for remote access, corporate tools or your own server. Disadvantages: everything you do from that address is attributable to one account, so the anonymity of the crowd is gone; and it typically costs extra.

Who benefits from a dedicated IP

  • Banking and payments. Some banks freeze accounts or demand re-verification when a login comes from a new address every day. A fixed address stops that.
  • Remote work and servers. IT departments and cloud consoles often allow access only from listed addresses. A dedicated IP is the only way to use a VPN and stay on the list. The company-VPN side of this is in VPN for remote work.
  • Email deliverability. Sending mail from a shared VPN address that others have abused gets messages flagged; a dedicated address does not carry their history.
  • Fewer captchas. Shared addresses trigger challenges on many sites; a clean dedicated one mostly does not.
  • Hosting something at home and reaching it through the VPN by a fixed address.

Who should stay on shared

  • Anyone whose goal is privacy from websites and the network: the crowd is the protection.
  • Everyday browsing, travel, public Wi-Fi. Shared does the job and costs nothing extra.
  • Anyone who does not have a specific service that needs a fixed address.

The privacy trade-off, stated plainly

With a dedicated IP, a website that sees the address twice knows it is the same customer, even without cookies. Combined with a browser fingerprint, that is a persistent identifier; how fingerprints work is in browser fingerprinting explained. The provider also knows which account holds which address, so what its policy says about connection data matters more than on shared servers. Read the specifics, as described in what does no logs mean.

A sensible pattern is to use both: the dedicated IP for the two or three services that need it, a shared server for everything else, switching in the app.

Dedicated IP versus a static home IP

They solve different problems. A static IP from your ISP is fixed but exposes your home connection and location. A dedicated VPN IP is fixed and sits in a data center of your choosing, with the tunnel protecting the path from your device. For remote access to home systems, a dedicated VPN IP is usually safer than opening ports on a home router.

Questions to ask a provider

  1. Is the dedicated IP truly single-user, or a small pool?
  2. Which locations are available?
  3. Does it work with all protocols in the app, or only some?
  4. Can it be combined with shared servers in the same subscription?
  5. What connection data is kept for dedicated addresses?

404 VPN's Premium plan includes a dedicated IP alongside shared servers, multi-hop and family access, on the same VLESS and WireGuard apps with DNS inside the tunnel and a kill switch. Plans are on the home page; what is stored is in the privacy policy.