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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Had to buy an IPv4 address for a VPS the other day in order to clone some git repositories. Couldn't believe it. Costing their customers money when they should be able to support v6 by now.

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What VPS are you using that doesn't come with both IPv4 and IPv6?

There are options where you pay 1€/IPv4/month and IPv6s are free.

There are plenty of low end providers that support IPv6 only.

At that scale price of IPv4 is the highest cost of the VPS.

Here is a list of providers I created back in 2022.

https://blog.miyuru.lk/ipv6-hosting-2022/

Hetzner charges extra for IPv4 address, as I believe most of them do. I know because I went through the same crap.

It seems more like a weird Hetzner thing that they won't give you a IPv4 NAT gateway.

How would a server-side NAT know which Hetzner customer it should route a request to? It has an encrypted packet arriving at this shared address on port 443. You can route a shared address to the proper service based on the HTTP Host header but that can only be done by the customer using their encryption key, so no sharing an address between customers. Home LAN NAT only works because the router can change the source port used by the request so that responses are unambiguously routed to the right client.

I don't think they're saying they should support incoming connections on such a NAT, I think they're saying that servers behind the NAT would be able to make outgoing connections (e.g. to access shared resources).

Well, the answer is easy. It doesn't do any forwarding, so a random 443 packet gets dropped.

It would be the same as with home NAT. Your device can create TCP connections outbound but can't listen/accept.

It would solve the problem of not being able to communicate to another IPv4 server but it prevents you from hosting your own.

They charge €0.50 per month to add an IPv4 address. A shared IPv4 NAT gateway introduces a whole lot of problems for them just to support customers who need IPv4 but don't want to pay a tiny amount for it.

AWS charges for ipv4 doesn't it?

In regards to an EC2, AFAIK, not necessarily. You pay extra for an elastic IP (IPv4) which is the equivalent to a static IP but the EC2 is assigned an IPv4 address and an IPv6 when IPv6 is enabled.

Beginning in early 2024, AWS began charging for every IPv4 address in-use on your resources.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...

Aw, man. I forgot about that.

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