My hosting company has just announced that IPv6 is now available:
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.
Given it is a parallel IP number, and only for http access at that, will this achieve anything meaningful? Is there any downside?
It seems to me that the more their customers choose to use their v6 addresses the more likely they are to v6-ify their other services, and building more v6 expertise in-house is going to be good for everybody. It might be fun to provide a little something for people who use v6 to get to your blog, like a little dancing icon or whatever (that sort of thing is becoming common).
The only downside I can see is that if you’re providing v6-based services and you’ve got a user coming in over IPv6, if your v6 interface becomes unreachable (I would expect more routing problems, etc, in the short term) the user will see a delay while their browser tries the v6 address, fails, and then switches to the v4 address (we see this from time to time on the DREN). But it certainly won’t be any slower than your old commenting system and for web services it’s really not that noticeable.
I wouldn’t know how to tell WordPress to distinguish between IPv4 & IPv6. The plugins on offer don’t seem to have been updated recently.
WordPress proper wouldn’t care (or shouldn’t, perhaps some php code makes use of the IP address of the client accessing it — tracking/stats in particular), the http server handing the content out might (maybe).
The reason is because IANA just handed out it’s last /8 netblock (to APNIC, sigh). There are 5 /8’s left, one for each RIR. IPv4 is expected to be depleted completely within 6 months although effectively, it’s gone now. See also: https://www.arin.net/announcements/2011/20110201.html