How to Get Your Own ASN

Gavin Phratsachack · operator, AS218248 · Minnesota, USA - hosted in Düsseldorf, Germany

In October 2026 I got my own autonomous system number — AS218248 — as a hobbyist, from Minnesota, with no company and no datacenter of my own. It took about a week from application to a globally visible announcement: the application was submitted on Oct 28, 2026, and AS218248 was allocated on Oct 29, 2026, announcing 2a0c:b641:fa0::/44 the same day. This is exactly what I did, what it cost, and what I would do differently.

If you just want to see the result, it is running now — the full story is on the network page.

What RIPE actually wants from you

An ASN in the RIPE region is not bought off a shelf; a sponsoring LIR (Local Internet Registry) applies for it on your behalf, and RIPE wants a real use case. In practice that meant three things for me:

• A multihoming justification — two upstream providers or peers, not one. My bundle supplied both: Servperso (AS34872) and Pixinko (AS210233) as transit.
• A presence in the RIPE region — I live in Minnesota, outside the RIPE region, so I needed a footprint there. The Servperso VPS in Düsseldorf is that footprint.
• A stated plan — what the ASN is for and what will run on it. Mine was hobby BGP learning: routing policy, prefix filtering, and RPKI/ROA validation, plus web hosting, DNS, and NTP on the VPS.

You do not need a company. I applied as an individual — that only mattered later, when LocIX Frankfurt turned out to require a company-registered ASN (LocIX Düsseldorf did not).

Step 1: pick a sponsor

I went with Servperso's ASN + VPS bundle: €89/year for the ASN plus an IPv6 /44, and €13/month for the VPS, €245/year total at October 2026 prices. The bundle is the point — it gives you the ASN, the prefix, the RIPE-region server, and both transit sessions in one order, which is exactly what the application needs. Check current pricing before you order; mine is what I paid in October 2026.

I did look at standalone sponsors first (Inferno Communications and Ipregistry were the cheapest I found in October 2026). They were cheaper on paper, but then I would still have needed a RIPE-region VPS and transit on top, so the bundle won on simplicity. Servperso bills annual renewals every September 1st, so my first renewal invoice lands September 1, 2027, not twelve months after ordering.

Step 2: the application answers

The application is mostly short answers, and the ones that matter are the ones RIPE checks against reality. What I actually wrote:

• How will the AS number be used? — a Servperso VPS in the RIPE region, announcing the IPv6 /44 via Servperso's dual transit providers, for hobby BGP learning (routing policy, prefix filtering, RPKI/ROA validation).
• What services will run on it? — “BGP routing experiments, web hosting, DNS, and NTP”.
• Where in the RIPE region does the network operate? — just “Servperso”. Do not invent a city or provider ASNs here; the bundle supplies both, and the application should say so plainly.

The mistake I nearly made: drafting placeholder answers with a guessed VPS city and guessed upstream ASNs. The bundle natively provides both upstream connections, so the honest answer is the correct one.

Step 3: allocation day

Servperso filed the application and RIPE allocated AS218248 on Oct 29, 2026 (organisation GAVINPHRATSA), with the prefix 2a0c:b641:fa0::/44. Two things surprised me:

• The ROA already existed. The /44 is ALLOCATED-BY-LIR, so Servperso holds the RPKI certificate — my own attempt to create a ROA in the RIPE dashboard was rejected (“Please enter a prefix you hold”). RIPEstat already showed the announcement as valid. If your prefix comes from a sponsoring LIR, check for an existing ROA before trying to make your own.
• The route object already existed too. The /44 showed as Unannounced at first, which is RIPE's routine note for an ASN that has not announced yet — not a problem, just the state before the first BGP session came up.

Step 4: announce it

The router is a single Debian 13 VPS (gnpk-as) running BIRD. The two transit sessions are Servperso (AS34872) and Pixinko (AS210233), both established on Oct 29, 2026. Three details that actually mattered:

• Do not announce before the ROA exists. An export filter alone does not originate a route either — BIRD needed a static blackhole route for the /44 so there was something to announce.
• Export only your own prefix, everywhere. Every session on AS218248 exports only the /44. That is the whole leak-prevention story at this scale.
• Expect propagation lag, not instant visibility. After about an hour with no external visibility I was briefly convinced the announcement was stuck at the provider. It was not — a later looking-glass check showed it was just propagation lag. A RIPEstat view on Oct 30 showed exactly 1 prefix announced, 100% RPKI-valid.

One honest caveat: the “dual transit” is Servperso direct plus Pixinko, and Pixinko is also Servperso-sponsored — so it is multihoming in the BGP sense, but not two fully independent backbones. That is fine for learning; it would matter if I were selling uptime.

Step 5: after go-live

Getting the ASN is the start, not the finish. The follow-through that made it a real network:

• RIPE database objects — aut-num, route6 object, as-set AS218248:AS-GNPK, and my person object (GA13836-RIPE). My maintainer (gnpk-mnt) sits alongside Servperso's on the aut-num, so I can update it myself.
• PeeringDB — net 44063, policy Open, IPv6-only.
• RPKI tightening — the covering ROA originally had max-length /128, which RIPEstat flagged as OVERSIZED. Servperso tightened it to exactly /44 on Nov 9, 2026, verified valid. The tradeoff is locked in: a future /48 carve-out will not validate until the ROA is loosened again.
• Peering — LocIX Düsseldorf (both route servers, plus a bilateral) and ixFabric Düsseldorf followed in the first two weeks. Details are on the network page and the peering page.

What it costs, all in

At October 2026 prices: €89/year for the ASN + /44, plus €13/month for the VPS — €245/year. I upgraded the VPS in place to Advanced (3 vCPU, 4 GB, 20 GB) on Nov 10, 2026 for €17/month, so my running cost is now €293/year. Everything else — BIRD, RPKI validation, DNS, NTP, mail — is free software on the same box. The real cost is evenings, not money.

Should you do it?

If you want to learn BGP, yes — there is no substitute for operating the real thing. Reading about convergence is one thing; watching your own prefix propagate, debugging a tunnel, or learning why a ROA max-length matters is the education. It is affordable, the community is welcoming, and directories like bgp.services list providers who will sell BGP to individuals. Just go in knowing it is a hobby network: single VPS, IPv6-only, no team, no SLA. The skills are the same ones you would use at ten times the size.

Find AS218248 around the internet: PeeringDB · bgp.tools · RIPEstat · Hurricane Electric · Network · Peering policy