121 lines
4.2 KiB
Markdown
121 lines
4.2 KiB
Markdown
title: How using IPv6 saves money
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---
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pub_date: 2019-11-18
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---
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author: ungleich
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---
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twitter_handle: ungleich
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---
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_hidden: no
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---
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_discoverable: yes!
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---
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abstract:
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It's not a question of ideologcy or technology, but of resources.
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---
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body:
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Today we focus on one of the very obvious effects of IPv6: saving
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resources and thus money. This post is part of the
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[how IPv6 changes the world](/u/blog/how-ipv6-changes-the-world/)
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series.
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## The general way of saving money with IPv6
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Economically, the less of something exists, the more expensive it
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is. There is only one Mona Lisa and that one is quite
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expensive. Similar if you move out of a city
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(like to
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[Digital
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Glarus](https://hack.digitalglarus.ch/hacking-and-living-in-hotel-diesbach.html)),
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rent become more affordable.
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As stated in the previous post, it has gotten quite expensive for companies
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to acquire IPv4 address space and
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[the prices are
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rising](https://www.retevia.net/address-pricing-2019-and-beyond/).
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Compared to what we paid 2 years ago, the
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**market price is now 600% as high**.
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So as a company like us, when the cost is rising, we transparently
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forward the price increase to the end users to stay profitable.
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So if you opt out of IPv4, we don't need to buy more space and neither
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of us needs to spend money on it.
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## Most services work without IPv4
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And this brings me to the question of what one can do without an
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explicit IPv4 address. And the answer is: almost everything you could
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do with an IPv4 address.
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Here at ungleich we spent quite some time to allow a seamless
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migration to an IPv4 free world:
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* If you want your server to be reachable from the IPv4 Internet,
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you can use our [IPv4-to-IPv6
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Proxy](https://redmine.ungleich.ch/projects/open-infrastructure/wiki/How_to_use_the_IPv4-to-IPv6-Proxy),
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which even works with HTTPS.
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* If you want to access something via IPv6, but you don't have IPv6
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connectivity, we can provide you with an [IPv6
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VPN](https://ipv6vpn.ch), which works even through CGNAT. It is also
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free, if you have any VPS running from [IPv6OnlyHosting](https://ipv6onlyhosting.com).!
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There are rare exceptions of things that do not yet fully work, but
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we even work on these cases.
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## Saving money #1: IPv6 only VPS
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One of the most obvious gains is, if you decide to go with
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[IPv6 only VPS](https://ipv6onlyhosting.com/), because there you are
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directly rewarded more affordable prices.
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Be it Google, ungleich or our friends at
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[mythic beasts](https://www.mythic-beasts.com/), we are all in the
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same situation that IPv4 addresses cost us money.
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As a user, you even have the ability influence this
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development: the more IPv6 only services you consume and the less you
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rely on IPv4, the more it becomes the standard and the less everyone
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is depending on IPv4. It's a positive feedback cycle.
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## Saving money #2: Going IPv6 only
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Another very simple case is the network management in SMB and even
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enterprises. The bigger you are, the more networks you have to manage
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and in our experience, dual stack networks (IPv6+IPv4) are no fun to
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maintain and have rather high complexity when it comes to security /
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ACLs/ firewalling.
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However you will need IPv6 in your network eventually anyway. So the
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strategy that we recommend is to switch directly to IPv6 only
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networks.
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This way your network planning becomes significantly easier, also in
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comparison to IPv4 networks. You don't have to spend a lot of time
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into network planning anymore, as you can use a /64 for every
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individual networks.
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This way you reduce complexity and are future proven at the same time.
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## Saving money #3: Not using the cloud
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Another interesting aspect with IPv6 is to avoid cloud services at
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all. Instead of uploading your data somewhere and having somebody else
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downloading it again, you can easily share data or communicate with
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other employees directly using IPv6.
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## Saving money #4: The IPv6 Black Friday
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At the moment we run a special IPv6 promotion campaign
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named [Black IPv6
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Friday](https://swiss-crowdfunder.com/campaigns/black-ipv6-friday?locale=en)
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at which you can even get up to 50% discount on the already more
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affordable IPv6 only products.
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## More money saving?
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If you think we missed an opportunity to save money with IPv6, let us
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know on the [IPv6 Chat](https://ipv6.chat) and we will add the hint
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for others.
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