My VPS provider is running a promotion where I can get up to 5 additional public IPv4 addresses for a one-time cost of $25 each. I have always only used a single public IP address per VPS. Would there be any advantage of having additional public IP addresses?
I know some people do not consider a VPS self-hosting, but this is the most relevant community I could think of and the question is also applicable for homelabs as well.
For http(s), yes. Other services that don’t support host routing, which is most of them, no.
Depending on the service, you totally can, provided they include some way to recognize them. For example, the first few bytes of SSH are unique, so I made a simple TCP server that would forward traffic to an HTTP(S) server or SSH server depending on those bytes.
Most things people self host are either torrent clients, HTTP(s) or are game servers. The first one can pick a port arbitrarily. The second can do host routing. The third - some of them support SRV records so you can direct the client to an arbitrary port. It’s becoming less common to need multiple public IPv4 addresses.