Deploy360 6 June 2014

How To Make Your Website Available Over IPv6

Andrew Mcconachie
By Andrew McconachieFormer Intern

IPv6 BadgeDo you run a website and want to make it available via IPv6? This post will help you make that happen.

The best place to start would be our article “Making Content Available Over IPv6”  for a general overview of the different IPv6 deployment solutions and pitfalls. Specifically, you’ll want to determine if you need to provide any IPv4 to IPv6 transition technology, or if you can just jump straight to native IPv6 everywhere.

Using a Content Delivery Network(CDN) can be a quick and easy way to deploy content over IPv6. CDNs abstract away much of the pain of networking infrastructure and let publishers focus on content. For a more detailed look into CDNs, and what they can offer you, check out this video from Dan York. We also maintain a list of IPv6 capable CDNs.

If you already have a hosting provider or CDN you should first find out if they support IPv6. Contact them and ask them. The more people who contact them asking for IPv6 the more likely they are to offer it. If they do not offer IPv6 we maintain a listing of some hosting providers that do. Given the costs associated with changing hosting providers, you proably want to start with asking your current hosting provider first prior to switching.

After your website has IPv6 connectivity you’ll need to update DNS. Where IPv4 uses ‘A’ records in DNS, IPv6 uses ‘AAAA’ records. These ‘AAAA’, or quad-A, records tell people connecting to your website what its IPv6 address is. You’ll also want to update your reverse DNS, or PTR, records to point to your new IPv6 addresses. Where IPv4 used in-addr.arpa for reverse DNS lookups, IPv6 uses ip6.arpa.

NOTE: If you are using a CDN, you will usually NOT have to do this because the CDN takes care of handling all of your DNS entries for you.

With your IPv6 connectivity assured and your DNS finalized, it’s time to relax and realize you’re ahead of the curve. Your content is now available to all those visitors who are connecting to the Internet using IPv6.

Still have more questions about how to make your content available over IPv6? Please let us know how we can help you!

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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