On June 8th, 2011, it was World IPv6 Day!. As you’re most likely aware, IPv4 (our current IP addresses, known as 123.123.123.123) are about to run out. There’s roughly, 12,347,472 IPs left on the Internet which seems like a lot however it will be gone in less then a year.
When the internet was first “designed”, nobody could have imagined the internet would be as big as it is today and how almost every single person in the world is now online, therefore IPv4 IP space had to run out sooner or later and we’re now at that point.
They’ve been developing IPv6 for many years but up until the last few years, nobody really gave it the attention it deserves as of today, there’s still a lot of ISPs who have no interest in re-designing their network for IPv6.
Our control panel, cPanel doesn’t yet support IPv6 for customer facing websites, however they are currently working on it. However in the mean time, we’ve been busy getting IPv6 ready while we wait on cPanel!
As of a few weeks ago, our main website StableHost.com is now IPv6 accessible.
stablehost.com. 120 IN AAAA 2600:3c01::19:d000
stablehost.com. 120 IN AAAA 2600:3c03::1d:2000
As you can see, IPv6 is a lot different then you may be used to — the IP addresses are much longer and use letters as well. If you’re familiar with DNS, they also use AAAA records, instead of ‘A’ records that IPv4 uses. If you’re curious why we have two AAAA records for our main website, it’s due to the load balancing of our corporate website we have. Remember — we take uptime very serious!
I’m happy to also report that our customer-facing nameservers are also IPv6 accessible:
ns1.stablehost.com. 120 IN AAAA 2001:470:1f0e:b89::2
ns2.stablehost.com. 120 IN AAAA 2600:3c01::f03c:91ff:fe93:a830
Over the next few weeks, we will be deploying IPv6 across all of our Phoenix network — what does this mean for you? It means the minute cPanel comes out with a IPv6 version, we’ll be able to deploy IPv6 to our customers.
