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Comment by decasia | Hacker News Reader

So I have a tiny personal website hosted on ec2. Right now the DNS points to the server's public IPv4 address. But I don't really want to pay $40+/year for an IPv4 for my personal project.

Does anyone have experience switching a small personal site to IPv6 only in 2023?

I'm guessing the vast majority of my (North American/European-based) friends and visitors can probably connect just fine to an IPv6 address. I wish I knew what percentage it is.

I guess I could add an AAAA record and check what percentage of traffic actually uses it.

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According to Google (https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html), 60% of word-wide users wouldn't be able to visit your website.

In the US, it would be about ~50% of users, while in Europe it's ranging from 30% (France) to 98% (Spain) who wouldn't be able to visit the website.

But yeah, I'd do what you say in the bottom of your comment. Add AAAA records and then see how many people uses ipv6 compared to ipv4 and then decide.

Sigh, so basically it's impossible to switch without shredding an already tiny audience. I'm sure it won't be a nice UX either to have a "can't connect to this IP" error in someone's browser.

IPv6 has been around for so long now, I'm disappointed it doesn't have a little bit higher adoption.

And if all else fails, you can put something like Cloudflare in front of it to handle IPv4 traffic.

Which than you're back to paying $40+/year to ensure you don't get wiped from their "free" tier when they feel like it.

Nothing is free forever.

True, it is a temporary solution though to how long Cloudflare offers it.

They have had a free tier since they launched over a decade ago. I think they’ve found a way to monetize that traffic or at least the data they collect on the sites they proxy because it’s survived so long.

I think it's the same model as free antivirus. Free customers provide a lot of data to analyze and detect threats, which translates into increased value of the product to the paying customers.

Also gives you a lot of traffic which you can use to test new deployments without disrupting paying customers.

I've been on their free tier since launch. Granted, it's nothing high-traffic, but a personal website shouldn't reach any "please upgrade" thresholds.

Might be a good idea to make a hidden request from your homepage to an ipv6 only resource. Then log how many of your visitors actually fail.

It's a chicken and egg problem: as long as sites are available through ip4, ISPs have no incentive to provide ip6, and since ISPs often don't provide ip6, sites can't go ip6-only. One possible solution would be to provide both and throttle ip4 traffic, then better speed can provide incentive to upgrade to ip6.

I understand that Movistar, the largest Spanish ISP, is currently deploying IPv6 in beta at the moment. I expect that will trickle down to the various resellers of Movistar's network shortly after. Hopefully that will get that 98% down in the near future. :(

So if a domain only has a AAAA record, and for whatever reason a user can’t use IPv6, what sort of error message would the user see?

Found https://test-ipv6.com and:

https://ipv6.ams2.test-ipv6.com/ip/?callback=?&testdomain=te...

I get the following from Chrome:

> This site can’t be reached

> Check if there is a typo in ipv6.ams2.test-ipv6.com.

>DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN

>>DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN

This is because your OS is not querying AAAA records. I am gonna guess that your using macos.

The most common error would be a "connection time out".

I'm not sure, but I believe I was on Windows 10 at the time. Shortly after this, I checked the appropriate boxes on my router (UDM-PRO) and my home network now supports IPv6. Passed all the tests on that website at least.

The client shouldn't even attempt to get an AAAA record unless they have an IPv6 stack available. In that case, their client should try to look up an A record and get an NXDOMAIN error which the browser usually shows as "IP address could not be found". If the client does attempt IPv6, you'll get a stack error when trying to connect to the remote host because the kernel will reject the address family and you'll get something like "network is unreachable". Some clients will also degrade from AAAA to A on error so you'll get the NXDOMAIN error as above.

I wrote this a few years ago, but I feel like putting a dedicated IPv4 like 66.66.66.66 in the A record would inform the web browser or other software that the website is only reachable via IPv6, and a more informative error message could be displayed.

This would require a proper RFC of course, with support from IANA and web browsers.

I think there’s a difference between “don’t” and “can’t”.

It’s not clear to me on that page how it describes “can’t”, other than ambiguous (to me) graph labels.

Is there more info elsewhere that describes the “can’t”?

Chrome connects to google through ip6, if it succeeds, then ip6 is available, thus they gather statistics.

That's a high price tag! On my Hetzner instance I pay 0.5€ per month and IPv4 adress, so 6€ per year.

> tiny personal website

I'd recommend just migrating to cloudflare pages or github pages; they're both free

How about removing the public IP and receiving connection from cloudfront? Or have it hosted in apprunner. Then you cname your domain to the services' domain, and skip the cost.

Yep I think that's plan B, thanks.

Throwing the VPC behind cloudfront is probably the best course of action, if your site is static I'd recommend looking into S3 + Cloudfront for hosting it. It's basically free, and great if your site is mostly static. I run a few scheduled jobs on Lambda to pull some data for my site and it comes out at basically $0 every month.

EC2 stack is overpriced for small and hobby websites. Lightsail is far more appropriately priced.

Cloudflare's gateway supports IPv6 and will serve over IPv4 if you want to use that.

Why not switch to a different provider? AWS is really pricey for what you get

> Does anyone have experience switching a small personal site to IPv6 only in 2023?

Trivial. Just put Cloudflare in front of it.

For a small personal website I suggest to look at alwaysdata.com. In France so ipv6 support is a given.

Switch to linode.

So I used to use DigitalOcean for around the same intro price point, but after a while I realized that I could pay $22/year for a t4g.nano ec2 instance instead of $72 for the cheap DigitalOcean VPS. I guess in the end, the $22/year was too good to be true and the DO/Linode pricing effectively bundles in the price of the IPv4 address.

Linode was too slow and had outages in my experience. Used them for years.

Replaced them with lightsail and don’t have any of those problems, plus I can pick FreeBSD.

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