Hosting Public Addresses

Updated Oct 15, 2026

This is an optional feature for people who own a block of public internet addresses and want to hand them out to virtual machines (VMs), one address per VM. Think of it as renting out a street address: each customer VM gets its own public address, and everything sent to that address is passed straight to it.

If you only run websites, you can ignore this page. Nothing happens until you create a pool.

The two ideas

• A pool is a group of public addresses, plus the private network the VMs live on. You choose the names: standard and ham are just examples.
• An allocation gives one public address from a pool to one VM.

You can forward everything sent to the address, or only the ports you list. A VM that is forwarded only some ports can also have those ports limited to certain visitors (for example, remote login only from a trusted list) or have specific visitors blocked.

Setting up

1. Open the Pools tab and create a pool: the public range, the private VM network, the gateway, and any addresses to hold back (like your router's own).
2. Open the Allocations tab and add one: pick the pool, name the VM and the customer. The lowest free address is used unless you ask for a specific one.
3. The result shows what to set up on the VM itself: its private address, gateway and netmask, plus a ready-made line for Proxmox.

The Check button on an allocation confirms that it's live.

Good to know

• Anything running on a hosted address is directly on the internet. The VM is responsible for its own firewall.
• Addresses already used by a site or port rule can't be hosted.
• Block lists apply to hosted VMs (IPv4).