If you're looking at one of Snel.com's great range of products to meet your hosting needs, one of the key benefits of our service is the fact all our servers are offered with native IPv6 by default. As our entire infrastructure is IPv6 supported, you can rest assured that your dedicated servers with instant setup are fully futureproofed.
Why IPv6 is important for your server?
For the uninitiated, IPv6 is an advanced protocol for assigning web addresses that offers far more potential combinations that the older IPv4 technology that is most commonly used. This assigned each device a unique 32-bit numerical IP address, represented as four numbers ranging from 0 to 255. The problem with this is that there are limited combinations of these numbers - around 4.3 billion - and they are fast running out. With the use of the internet expanding at an ever-increasing rate, the world will use all available IPv4 addresses very soon. This is where IPv6 comes in. Whereas IPv4 supports 32-bit addresses, IPv6 uses a hexadecimal system to generate 128-bit addresses. This equates to 2128, or 3.4×1038 addresses available, which should be enough to secure the future of the internet for a very long time to come.
Snel.com provides IPv6 on all of their servers
Snel.com provides 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 free IPv6 addresses to customers - complete with reverse DNS - and our customers are able to use the Native IPv6 addresses as soon as their server is activated. If you're still on IPv4, it may therefore be a good idea to make the switch to IPv6 in order to ensure you can expand in the future. Several of the world's biggest websites, including Google and Facebook, have already done this and earlier this year a World IPv6 Launch day was held to persuade businesses to become IPv6-enabled.
Updating software and routers to cope with this may be a complex and time-consuming process, which is why it is a great idea to use native IPv6 servers, such as those provided by Snel.com, in order to make this transition as straightforward as possible. The drive to get websites to update to IPv6 seems to be working, as earlier this month, data from Akamai revealed the amount of traffic using IPv6 has exploded since the first efforts were made last year, with ZDNet noting this has been driven greater availability of the system and more end-user devices that support the protocol.
