Do you support IPv6?

“IPv6” is a new(-ish) standard for Internet connections. We fully support IPv6 and it’s enabled by default for new sites, although customers can disable IPv6 for their website if they wish.

On this page:

How do I enable or disable IPv6 for my site?

You can enable or disable IPv6 for your site using the DNS section of our control panel:

  • Login to the “My Account” control panel (having trouble?)
  • Click Domain Name Options
  • Click Edit DNS Zone
  • Scroll down to IPv6 connections
  • Follow the instructions to enable or disable IPv6.

What is IPv6?

IPv6 is a way for computers to make Internet connections to servers, and a way to give each computer it’s own address.

For many decades, computers on the Internet used “IPv4” connections. In fact, “the Internet” mostly just meant “computers with an IPv4 address that are able to make connections to any other computer with an IPv4 address”.

Unfortunately, IPv4 has some problems. The biggest problem is that there are only about 4 billion IPv4 addresses available, which isn’t enough to connect every computer that needs to be on the Internet. Almost all of those 4 billion addresses have been used or reserved.

Internet engineers recognized this problem more than a decade ago and created IPv6, a new standard with many more addresses. There are enough IPv6 addresses to give trillions of them to every person on the planet. (IPv6 has other technical advantages, too.)

IPv6 is gradually being added to existing computers so they can use both IPv4 and IPv6. These computers will have two separate addresses: an IPv4 address that looks like “192.0.2.17” and an IPv6 address that looks quite different, such as “2001:db8::1:2:cafe”. Most computers now have both.

When two computers on the Internet both have IPv6 addresses, they can use IPv6 to connect to each other instead of using IPv4. In fact, Internet standards say that two computers with IPv6 addresses should always use IPv6. Eventually, nearly every computer on the Internet will have an IPv6 address and most connections will take place over IPv6.

When you create a website with us, we enable both IPv4 and IPv6 connections. You can disable IPv6 if you want to, but we don’t recommend it unless you have to use a very old script that has bugs causing it to fail with IPv6 connections.

Will using IPv6 make my site more reliable, or less?

Having IPv6 enabled should make most sites more reliable. We use IPv6 on all our own sites, and most large companies do the same.

When you enable IPv6, we tell the rest of the Internet that computers should make an IPv6 connection to your site if they’re able to do so, and make an IPv4 connection if not. Most browsers these days will actually try both methods if one fails, so connections to your site are usually more likely to work if you have IPv6 enabled.

On the other hand, there are small number of potential problems that IPv6 can introduce: For example, some very old scripts for websites don’t work well with IPv6. Also, a small number of computer connections can be broken in such a way that they take longer or fail completely when connecting to IPv6 addresses, although people with that problem will likely have difficulty connecting to other sites, too. (You can use the Test Your IPv6 site to check your connection. Just so it’s clear, that site tests your own cable/DSL/dialup connection, not our servers or your site with us.)

Is there anything else I should know?

Here are some technical details for IPv6 experts:

  • We’re providing native, dual-stack IPv6. It’s not 6to4 or another tunneling scheme.
  • All our servers have outgoing IPv6 support. They prefer IPv6 for outgoing connections to other IPv6-enabled sites as detailed in RFC 3484.
  • If you enable IPv6, we allow incoming IPv6 connections on ports 80 and 443 (for websites) and on port 22 (for ssh). We don’t currently allow IPv6 connections to any other ports or services.
  • IPv6 is fully supported for SSL sites. Our Apache Web servers will recognize the IPv6 address of your site and choose the correct certificate to present to the browser.
  • Each IPv6 site has a dedicated IPv6 address on our servers, and IPv6 reverse DNS for that address works correctly.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

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