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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

What does ipv6 give you that virtual hosts don't?

In theory direct connections between all devices on the internet. In practice, everything's still going to be behind a firewall. But it's still an improvement over NAT, and hopefully we'll eventually get universally adopted protocols for applications to open ports.

I've been using IPv6 more recently, and one nice thing as a developer is being able to use the same IP address for local connections and internet connections. Simplifies managing TLS certs for example, since the IP address used by Let's Encrypt is the same one I'm connecting to while developing.

You misunderstand. I'm asking why IPv6 would help this specific situation, not why ipv6 is nice in general. None of what you said applies to this context.

You're right, I was responding to your comment directly and not taking context into account.

I guess maybe what GP is getting at is that with vhosts on IPv4 you need to have some sort of load balancer in order to share the IP, but with IPv6 you can flatten this out and give every host it's own IP?

If you have multiple machines with their own IPs, v4 or v6 makes no difference. If you have a single machine (vhosting), the number of IPs and their type makes no difference.

The difference is IPv4 addresses are far more expensive

I will quote the comment you are trying to justify:

> With ipv6 they can now be fully scaled easily but they are absolutely awesome, much easier to scale because you can give your client a simple list of sse services and its essentially stateless if done right.

If you don't understand it either please stop saying random stuff about IPv6 that we already know and has nothing to do with this thread.

I stand by my comment. I think the suggestion that scaling might be limited by IPv4 cost is a reasonable guess as to OP's concerns.

How is it limited? How is it less limited with IPv6?

A client gets an SSE endpoint (hostname). That endpoint maps to an IP. A server at that IP receives the connection. Which part is better with v6?

Are we talking about the few cents it would cost you to give each server an IPv4? Are we thinking about a distant future where that cost is not negligible compared to the cost of compute? Something else?

AWS is now charging about $3/mo per IPv4 address. If that's negligible for you, awesome. It's not negligible for everyone.

So that was the only argument. Wow, I'm glad I finally got to it, but I'm not amazed. All it took is making it up myself.

I don't use AWS so ok thanks. And if I did, I would use their ingress/gateway solutions, which totally circumvent this problem (while being quite expensive anyway).

I agree, AWS is way too expensive. In fact you have a good point which is that the cost of compute on AWS is significantly higher, such that the relative cost of IPs isn't as significant. You can get a solid VPS from Hetzner for the cost of an AWS IP address.

What's your preferred provider?

I don't feel it would be right to just give you an answer after chasing yours 11 messages deep and finally having to make it up myself. I don't have the kind of emotional energy it takes to communicate with you.

why dropbox when rsync"

I know what you're referencing but I really don't see why. What does IPv6 have to do with this?

Similitudes in timbre. There is plenty of room for improving the state of the web. Not 100% certain IPV6 is that, but it certainly offers more address space, and that would be foolish to avoid embracing simply because old tech is duct-tape-able enough.

I am not trying to say IPv6 is bad (in fact I'm a fan), I am asking what benefits it offers specifically in the context of SSE.

I am not the one making a claim, I expected some arguments with it. "IPv4 is not web scale" is not good enough https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs

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