Summary

  • ARIN's registry entry for AS20473 names The Constant Company, LLC, organisation handle CHOOP-1, registered on 11 May 2001 — a handle whose prefix still spells out the company's older Choopa name, and a registry identity that has not moved in twenty-five years.
  • Vultr's lowest-priced advertised compute plan is labelled IPv6 Only, and ARIN bars any organisation that transfers IPv4 address space away from the waitlist for 36 months. Together those two documents show address space as an asset held under registry title rather than a utility that arrives with the server.

For two dollars and fifty cents a month, Vultr will rent you a small computer with half a gigabyte of memory, ten gigabytes of disk and half a terabyte of monthly transfer. The plan sits at the bottom of the company's public price list, and it carries a four-word label that matters more than the price: IPv6 Only (Vultr pricing).

To read that label properly you need two definitions. An IPv4 address is the 32-bit number that most of the internet still uses to find a machine — the familiar dotted quartet. An IPv6 address is its far larger successor, 128 bits long, and it is not interchangeable with the old one without translation machinery in between. When a cloud provider marks its cheapest plan IPv6-only, it is telling you that the scarce numbering resource is no longer part of the bargain at the bottom of the range. The server is cheap. The address is extra, or absent.

That is a product decision, and it is also a document about a company's balance sheet. The scarce thing being rationed at the entry price point was handed out by registries, not manufactured by the company selling the server. Which makes the next question the interesting one: who actually holds the addresses behind Vultr, and how long have they held them?

What the registry actually records

The authoritative answer starts with a query that returns an unglamorous block of text. ARIN, the regional internet registry that administers addresses and autonomous system numbers for the United States, Canada and parts of the Caribbean, answers for AS20473 with the following fields: network name AS-VULTR, handle AS20473, organisation The Constant Company, LLC with organisation handle CHOOP-1, registration date 2001-05-11 (ARIN whois for AS20473).

Take the pieces in turn, because each one is doing work. An autonomous system number is the identifier a network uses to announce routes to the rest of the internet; AS20473 is the one that carries Vultr's traffic. The organisation handle is the registry's own internal identifier for the legal entity that holds the number — not a brand name, not a website, but the record ARIN files the holder under. The registration date is May 2001.

That date deserves a moment. ARIN's records for this autonomous system predate the Vultr brand by roughly a decade. Whatever else changed at the company, the registry identity behind its network has not been reissued in twenty-five years, and registry identity is not a marketing asset that can be refreshed by redesigning a homepage.

The same identity shows up from a second direction. RIPE NCC's RIPEstat service, queried on 23 October 2026, returned holder "AS-VULTR - The Constant Company, LLC" with the announced flag set true, and placed the number inside the ARIN-assigned IANA 16-bit block 18432-20479 (RIPEstat AS-overview). Different organisation, different database schema, same answer. A third-party routing view agrees: Hurricane Electric's BGP Toolkit lists AS20473 as The Constant Company, LLC (Hurricane Electric). That last one is a routing observation rather than a registry record, and it is worth labelling as such, but it corroborates the holder name rather than contradicting it.

So the registry answer is not ambiguous. It is also not complete, which is where the rest of this story lives.

A handle that still spells Choopa

CHOOP-1. Read the prefix out loud and you are reading the company's older name.

Choopa is the legacy corporate name associated with this infrastructure, and it survives in two separate places in the public record. It is baked into the organisation handle that ARIN assigned to the entity holding AS20473. And it appears in the field that PeeringDB's network record for the same autonomous system uses to list alternative names: the record carries network id 813, organisation id 1051, name "The Constant Company", and an aka field reading "Vultr, Choopa" (PeeringDB). PeeringDB is an operator-maintained interconnection directory, not a corporate registry, so treat it as an operator's self-description rather than an authority. But it is the operator describing itself, and it lists three names for one network.

Vultr's own site closes the triangle from the brand side. The footer of the company's about page states that VULTR is a registered trademark of The Constant Company, LLC (Vultr about). So: a brand called Vultr, a registrant called The Constant Company, LLC, a legacy name called Choopa, and one autonomous system answering to all three.

Here is where I have to be careful about what I can and cannot assert. The retrieved registry document does not narrate a legal name change. It does not say that Choopa, LLC became The Constant Company, LLC on a particular date, and I have not read a corporate filing that establishes that sequence. The handle prefix and the aka field are consistent with a legacy naming layer surviving inside a record whose registrant is now The Constant Company, LLC — that is a reading of the evidence, not a quotation from it. Anyone repeating the stronger claim, that ARIN's record proves a specific reorganisation, is going beyond what the document says.

What the document does say is narrower and, for practical purposes, more useful: one legal entity has held this registry identity continuously since 2001, and the registry still files that entity under a handle derived from a name most of its customers have never heard.

Why an organisation handle is worth understanding

Registry vocabulary rewards a plain-language gloss, because the words sound administrative and the consequences are not.

An address block is a range of IP addresses assigned to an organisation. A registrant is the entity the registry considers the holder of record — the party with standing to transfer, reassign or keep the resource. A transfer is the registry-recognised movement of that resource from one holder to another. Allocation is the original act of handing space out; assignment is what a registry does when it places space with a specific user. And the waitlist, in ARIN's usage, is the queue an organisation joins when it wants IPv4 space that is not otherwise available.

None of these are brand concepts. They attach to legal entities, they are recorded against handles, and they determine who can do what with a number resource years later. That is why the CHOOP-1 handle is not trivia: it is the label under which a finite, transferable asset is filed.

What the network announces

Registry identity tells you who holds the number. It does not, by itself, tell you what the network does with it. For that, look at the routes.

RIPEstat's announced-prefixes response for as20473 returned a populated list of prefix announcements at observation time 2026-10-23T12:26:26Z, including 107.191.46.0/23 (RIPEstat announced prefixes). A prefix, glossed plainly, is a slice of address space that a network tells the rest of the internet it can reach; 107.191.46.0/23 is one such slice, covering a small contiguous run of addresses.

Two honest qualifications belong right here rather than in a footnote. First, that response carried an explicit note that results exclude routes seen by fewer than ten RIS full-feed peers — in plain terms, the measurement network drops announcements that not enough of its vantage points could see. Second, the list was truncated in the excerpt I retained, so I am not going to give you a count of Vultr's prefixes or a total of addresses. A number I did not read is a number I will not print.

What the list does establish is that AS20473 is not a dormant registration. It announces address space, the announcements are visible to a distributed measurement network, and therefore the registry identity described above is attached to live routing. The gap — and it is a real one — is the link from a specific announced prefix back to a specific registered holder. Establishing that each block announced by AS20473 is registered to The Constant Company, LLC, to a Choopa-named object, or to another affiliated holder would require reading the registry record for each individual network object. I did not do that, so I am not asserting it.

The holder of the autonomous system is documented; the holder of each prefix behind it is not, in this piece.

The rule that makes an address hard to give up

Now the part that turns a numbering fact into an economic one.

ARIN's transfer documentation states that an entity which transfers IPv4 address resources to another party will not be allowed to apply for IPv4 address space under Section 4.1.8, the ARIN waitlist, for a period of 36 months following that transfer (ARIN transfers).

Read it as a constraint rather than a formality. If a provider sells or leases away part of its IPv4 holdings, it cannot go back into the queue for three years. For a company that opens new cloud regions on a regular cadence — and Vultr does, as the next section shows — that is a genuine planning problem, because every new region needs addressing, and the fallback option is closed for three years after any outward movement.

The rule cuts both ways, and that is the point. It raises the value of what an established holder already has, because the alternative to holding is a 36-month exclusion from the queue. And it makes a transfer decision a commitment rather than a transaction. Address space acquired before exhaustion is not merely cheaper than address space bought now; under this policy it is structurally harder to replace.

Thirty-four regions, thirty-three regions, one number

Vultr's own about page states that the company is available in 34 cloud data centre regions (Vultr about). The page is undated in the excerpt I retained, which matters for how the figure should be read.

A company press release dated 19 May 2026 announces the launch of Vultr's 33rd global cloud data centre region, in Milan (Vultr Milan release, 19 May 2026). The same release describes the company as "the world's largest privately-held cloud infrastructure company" — a characterisation the company makes about itself, and one I am reporting as the company's language rather than as a verified ranking.

So there are two figures, thirty-three in May 2026 and thirty-four on an undated page, and they are not a contradiction. They are two snapshots of a number that moves. The reason to put them side by side is the cadence: each of those regions is a physical footprint that needs addresses, transit and interconnection, and each one is an argument for why a fifteen-year-old allocation is worth more to its holder than its original paperwork suggests.

There is a further detail worth flagging for anyone who wants to check this themselves. The count that appears on a company page and the count that appears in a press release will not always agree, because marketing pages get edited and releases get dated. Neither of those figures is a registry fact. They are the operator describing its own expansion, and they belong in the same category as the price list: company-published, useful, and not authoritative about holdings.

Where the evidence stops

Three boundaries shaped this piece, and stating them once is more useful than scattering hedges through the prose.

The first concerns ARIN's structured RDAP endpoint for the autonomous system. That machine-readable record could not be read as text in this research; the attempts came back empty or reported the endpoint as restricted. The verbatim registry text quoted above comes from ARIN's whois REST representation instead, which answered cleanly. The substance is therefore documented, but through one of ARIN's two public representations rather than both.

The second concerns Vultr's per-address IPv4 pricing. The public pricing page yielded the IPv6-only entry plan and its components, and nothing more granular on what an additional IPv4 address costs or how many a customer may request. So the article describes the shape of the rationing — the entry tier goes without — and does not claim a per-address figure. That is a real limit, and it is the single most valuable missing document for anyone continuing this work.

The third concerns transfer history. No ARIN transfer record naming The Constant Company, Choopa or any affiliate was read, so nothing here claims how or when specific blocks were acquired or moved. The 36-month rule is described as policy, not as an event that has happened.

Why the invoice is the interesting document

Put the two halves together and the shape of the thing becomes visible.

On one side, a registry record that has not changed holder since 11 May 2001, filed under a handle that still carries the company's previous name, attached to an autonomous system that announces live address space and answers to the same holder in three independent public sources.

On the other, a price list whose cheapest entry does not include the resource that record is about, and a policy that makes moving that resource outward a three-year commitment.

That combination is what address scarcity looks like from the inside of an established operator. It does not look like a crisis. It looks like an entry tier quietly redefined, a legacy name fossilised in a handle, and a set of holdings that a new market entrant cannot manufacture and must either buy, lease or route around. The customer paying $2.50 sees a plan label. The registry sees a holder of record, unchanged for a quarter of a century.

For readers who want the directory context on the entity itself, the working profile is at The Constant Company, LLC (Vultr, Choopa). Note what that profile does and does not currently carry: a service classification and an identity conflict flag, but no registry network footprint. The gap between an empty directory footprint and a live autonomous system announcing address space is itself informative. It is the same split this article has been tracing — a company whose brand, legal name and legacy name are three different strings, and whose registry record knows only one of them.