Any addressable device on the Internet has an IP address. Your home PC, your Xbox, your website…they’re all just a UNIQUE number on the Internet in the grand scheme of things.
To be more accurate, they’re all one LONG number, punctuated with three periods: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. 32-bit, 4 byte addresses. Simple enough. Short enough to memorize. And there are 4,294,967,296 possible addresses.
Four billion. With a B. A few million are reserved for specific uses, and there are some tricks to share IPs among devices, but four billion is the takeaway here.
“Back in the day” not much thought was really given to what might happen if the world ran out of IPs. And certainly not many thought that the Internet would grow to the size it has today.
But it finally happened. Today. The IANA IPv4 address free pool is now depleted.
If you’re looking for someone to blame, blame Vint Cerf. It’s all his fault!
Most people who’ve been given an allotment of IPs use them sparingly and have their own reserves built up. We’re sitting pretty ourselves and have plenty of older IPs that can be reallocated for future use if it ever comes to that.
And that’s a fine solution. For now. But we’re looking forward with the rest of the world to welcome IPv6 into our corner of the Internet.
IPv6 is the future of Internet addressing. It takes the world from 4 billion addresses to a maximum of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. That number is so big that I’m not even sure how to say it with my mouth.
The addresses themselves are far longer, as well. While an IPv4 address today might look like:
an IPv6 address would look like:
It’s going to take quite a while for all network providers and network devices worldwide to get IPv6-savvy (and some never will!) so “old-school” IPs aren’t going away anytime soon. Luckily a device can be assigned IPv4 and IPv6 addresses simultaneously so you can do an “out with the old/in with the new” at the same time!
That’s kind of where we’re at now.
All DreamHost customers can now add IPv6 IPs to their domains.
Just visit the “Manage Domains” section of your control panel and click the “Add IP” link by your domain to make the magic happen. This new address is tied to your hosting machine, but other services like email and MySQL are not yet supported. We also don’t (yet) support IPv6-only domains; you’ll need to have an IPv4 address on there too.
There is NO COST to add an IPv6 IP address to your DreamHost account. Go crazy. Throw one on every domain you host with us with reckless abandon. You’ll be helping to move things forward in your own little way.
February 3rd, 2011 at 4:04 pm
I always thought of DH as the actively innovating type. I can’t say that I’m surprised by this move ;) Good job!
February 3rd, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Thanks Dreamhost, you guys are the BEST!
February 3rd, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Great news!
Kudos to Dreamhost!
February 3rd, 2011 at 5:10 pm
My co-admin and I were just talk about this last night: “Dreamhost should support IPv6″.
ARE WE WIZARDS?
February 3rd, 2011 at 5:15 pm
That is awesome. Is there anyway to make it so all new domains we add get an address automagically?
February 3rd, 2011 at 5:15 pm
I’m just waiting for all the DEAD:BEEF and BAD:BEEF ips.
February 3rd, 2011 at 5:51 pm
I’ve added IPv6 addresses to most of my domains. The one is possibly going to let expire but I’m not sure at the moment.
February 3rd, 2011 at 6:05 pm
I added an IPv6 address to all domains but I noticed no new entry on the DNS listing. How long does it usually take to work though the system?
February 3rd, 2011 at 6:17 pm
So why didn’t you guys enable your nameservers to have native ipv6 addresses with ipv6 glue? Does your domain registration offer ipv6 glue?
February 3rd, 2011 at 6:53 pm
Like Robert, I added IPv6 addresses but now that the followup screen has gone away, I can’t find my full IPv6 address. Where can I see it?
February 3rd, 2011 at 6:56 pm
@sdayman
Here is what the followup screen says.
“2607:F298:0001:0107:0000:0000:08C2:156B has been assigned to domain.com in our hosting system!
There was no cost for this because you added an IPv6 address, which is always free.
The new DNS must propagate across the Internet so it might be a day or more before your new IP resolves. In the meantime we keep your old shared IP working as well so there is no downtime.
You may want to add Secure Hosting to this domain now that you have a unique IP!
Thanks for choosing us,
The Happy DreamHost IP Adding Robot!”
Under domain.com you will find the same addresses but abbreviated a bit. It will have :: instead of the bundle of zeros.
2607:F298:0001:0107:0000:0000:08C2:156B == 2607:F298:0001:0107::08C2:156B
February 3rd, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Just to clarify, IPv6 looks like eight block thingies, but my new one only shows seven, and even then one of them is blank. I thought each block should show four hex characters each.
February 3rd, 2011 at 8:33 pm
@Ross: We’re working on v6 nameservers, and will probably have those up and running in the next week.
@sdayman: A pair of colons in an IPv6 address indicates that two or more fields of zeroes are being omitted. Standard notation. Similarly, leading zeroes can be left off — for instance, Robert’s address above can be abbreviated simply as 2607:f298:1:107::8c2:156b.
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:56 pm
http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/26/the-number-of-possible-ipv6-addresses-read-out-loud/
February 3rd, 2011 at 11:41 pm
DH you’re the best!!
Will IPv6 addresses free “forever”?? Or maybe in the next year we’ll pay an yearly fee like Unique IPv4 IPs?
February 4th, 2011 at 1:35 am
Awesome!
Happy customer here. :)
I’ll be adding IPv6 addresses to all my domains soon.
Thanks DH!
February 4th, 2011 at 2:21 am
Trying to pass Hurricane Electric IPv6 certification, they need that the DNS servers for my domain must have AAAA records. ns1,ns2 and ns3.dreamhost.com must be IPv6 ready.
Is this expected to be done?
February 4th, 2011 at 2:22 am
Ok, I have added IPv6 addresses to my domains. Now, how can I test them?
February 4th, 2011 at 2:35 am
How does this interact with “HTTPS requires a dedicated IP”?
ie, can I now add HTTPS to all my domains without needing to buy an IPv4 address for each? (I can live with telling the users “upgrade to ipv6 if you want to access the secure version”)
February 4th, 2011 at 6:16 am
Just so COOL!
February 4th, 2011 at 9:13 am
Awesome!
I wonder if it will actually work with my PS.
February 4th, 2011 at 9:54 am
host -t aaaa blog.dreamhost.com
blog.dreamhost.com has no AAAA record
host -t aaaa dreamhost.com
dreamhost.com has no AAAA record
host -t aaaa panel.dreamhost.com
panel.dreamhost.com has no AAAA record
:-(
February 4th, 2011 at 12:40 pm
Why not add IP6 address to all the domains automatically?
February 4th, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Thanks Dreamhost! /adding IPv6 to all now…
February 5th, 2011 at 12:06 am
yeah, nice. now my question:
is it permanently free or just now?
do all IP in my account refer to one machine? (if shared actually yes)
February 5th, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Here’s mine:
2607:f298:1:109::5b4:56d4
Does that translate to:
2607:f298:0001:0109:0000:0000:05b4:56d4
I turned the :: into :0000:0000: so it’s now eight blocks.
February 5th, 2011 at 8:36 pm
sdayman,
Yes. Anytime you have 0:0, you can shorten it to :: . This is only allowed once in an address though.
My favorite one is localhost 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001
is just ::1
Notice in v6 how they only use one address for localhost. In v4, localhost is 127.0.0.0/8, which is a waste.
February 6th, 2011 at 10:12 pm
I haven’t really looked into the IP thing much, what exactly does these IPs do for us? How does it benefit my sites?
February 7th, 2011 at 1:32 pm
Shawn: http://gizmodo.com/#!5754195/what-does-the-ipv6-transition-mean-to-me
February 7th, 2011 at 6:33 pm
This will just take a bit of time to iron out. I reported a bug myself.
February 8th, 2011 at 3:15 pm
My IPv6 address has been setup and I can connect to it and it works great, but I haven’t seen the AAAA record setup yet in the non-editable DNS entries?
Does Dreamhost automatically setup the AAAA record when you add an IPv6 address or do you have to do that yourself?
February 9th, 2011 at 2:16 am
I added an IPv6 address to my website more than 48 hours ago, and still no go. I can connect to other IPv6 sites just fine (including one that was mentioned in these comments). I wonder if there is just a large backlog or something from all the new addressed being assigned. Anyone else having the same issue?
February 9th, 2011 at 5:58 am
How long until dreamhost.com has an IPv6 record?
February 9th, 2011 at 10:46 am
I’m also interested to know how this may work with https. I don’t much care if my site(s) share the same ip address with a million others. I do however make web based administration panels for clients and just use http auth for that. I’d feel a lot better if I could better secure the connections with TLS (for free obviously – don’t care about certs)
February 10th, 2011 at 5:48 am
I think the reason that DH does not automatically set AAAA records might be related with the connectivity and performance issues of (mainly) dual-stack implementations.
see also:
http://www.ipv6council.be/ipv6-faq/article/will-i-loose-customers-if-i
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/tests-show-ipv6-performance-issues-lurk
February 12th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Any word on when will DNSSEC come to dream town?
February 14th, 2011 at 11:56 am
I manually added an AAAA record to one of my domains and a few minutes later the “automatic” AAAA records appeared below in the non-editable section. I have another domain that also has an ipv6 address, but I did *NOT* manually add an AAAA record and it’s dns has *NOT* been updated with AAAA entries.
So perhaps the workaround is to manually add a single AAAA entry to your domain and then the others will show up.
March 1st, 2011 at 8:01 pm
Thank to Dreamhost. Just so cool.
March 2nd, 2011 at 9:14 am
Yay IPv6! Good job dreamhost.
But what happens to the IPv4? Will it become osbolete?
March 2nd, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Are there any advantages to adding this to our domains? Are there any possible disadvantages?
March 2nd, 2011 at 3:15 pm
And the IPv6 of the DreamHost DNS servers???
March 2nd, 2011 at 9:29 pm
The problem with IPv6 is that there is no way you can remember it, while it was quite easy to remember IPv4 addresses.
Where is IPv5 ??? :)
March 2nd, 2011 at 10:39 pm
thank you dreamhost….love you!
March 2nd, 2011 at 11:37 pm
Is it absolutely necessary to add IP6 to a domain? Surely IP4 will work forever as legacy technology. What is the advantage (apart from claiming to be bleeding edge) of adding to older domains?
March 3rd, 2011 at 12:23 am
Thanks a bunch, this puts you far ahead of the competition. I will gladly remain a customer with you!
March 3rd, 2011 at 1:10 am
Hey, your guys rocks! I love DH!
March 3rd, 2011 at 3:02 am
Nice. Note that if you add more than one IPv6 address to a domain, only the first one shows up on the manage domains panel.
March 3rd, 2011 at 6:06 am
Nice Top Thrill Dragster photo!
March 3rd, 2011 at 6:18 am
…and they said this would be difficult!
Awesome work guys…just awesome.
Now, where is the one-click “solve global warming” button?
March 3rd, 2011 at 10:14 am
Just like some already noticed, what’s the point in rolling out IPv6 if even your own domain dreamhost.com doesn’t feature an AAAA record? Be brave!
And on an interesting sidenote, when you enter an IPv6 adress in Google Chromes adress bar it will always search for that IP … http://2607:f298:2:121::ae9:a781 is not considered anything actually accessible .o|