Every website on our servers now answers over IPv6 as well as IPv4. If that sentence means nothing to you, that is rather the point: this is one of those changes that should be completely invisible from where you sit. This article explains what has changed, why it matters, and what you need to do about it, which is nothing.
Every device on the internet needs an address. The original scheme, IPv4, allows about 4.3 billion of them. That sounded generous in the 1980s. It is not generous now, and the pool of unallocated addresses ran out years ago. What has kept IPv4 working since then is a combination of increasingly aggressive address sharing and a secondary market in which blocks of addresses are bought and sold at real cost.
IPv6 is the replacement, and it is not a small increase. The address space is large enough that the practical problem of running out simply goes away. It has been a published standard since 1998, and the slow part has never been the technology. It has been getting every network, every hosting provider and every piece of software to support it at the same time.
Most of your visitors do not choose whether they arrive over IPv4 or IPv6. Their internet provider does, and increasingly it chooses IPv6. Mobile networks in particular have moved a long way, because a mobile operator adding millions of handsets has the address shortage as a daily operational problem rather than a theoretical one.
When a visitor on an IPv6-only or IPv6-preferred connection reaches a site that only has an IPv4 address, the connection has to be translated somewhere along the way. That translation works, but it is another piece of equipment in the path, another thing that can be congested, and another place where your visitors share an address with thousands of strangers. Sharing an address with strangers is also how a site ends up applying rate limits or security checks to innocent people, because from the server’s point of view a great many unrelated visitors appear to be the same one.
Serving IPv6 directly removes that hop for the visitors who can use it. It tends to be marginally faster, it is certainly simpler, and it means your logs and your security tooling see something much closer to one visitor per address.
Each hosted domain now publishes an AAAA record alongside its A record. An A record is the DNS entry that maps a name to an IPv4 address; AAAA is the same idea for IPv6. Browsers and other clients look for both, and modern ones try them in a way that falls back quickly if one is unreachable, so there is no penalty for publishing both.
Mail is unaffected by this change, and so is anything you have pointed elsewhere. If you host your website with us but your email is with another provider, or the other way round, nothing about that arrangement changes.
Nothing. There is no setting to turn on, no plan to change and no charge for it.
There are two situations where it is worth a moment’s thought. The first is if you manage your own DNS somewhere other than with us, in which case the AAAA record needs adding wherever your DNS actually lives, and we can tell you what value to use. The second is if you have anything that allows or blocks visitors by IP address, such as a plugin that restricts your administration area to your office. Those rules were written when every visitor arrived over IPv4. If you or your colleagues are on connections that now prefer IPv6, an allow list containing only IPv4 addresses can lock you out of your own site. It is a five minute check and it is much less annoying to do before it happens.
If you want to confirm your own site is answering, any of the public DNS lookup tools will show an AAAA record for your domain. Whether you personally connect over IPv6 depends on your own internet connection rather than on us, so do not be alarmed if you look at your site and find you are still arriving over IPv4. Plenty of people are, and will be for years. That is exactly why both are published.
If you have any questions about how this affects a specific setup, open a ticket and we will look at your account.