ungleich-staticcms/content/u/blog/how-ipv6-saves-you-money/contents.lr

title: How using IPv6 saves money
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pub_date: 2019-11-18
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author: ungleich
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twitter_handle: ungleich
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_hidden: no
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_discoverable: yes!
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abstract:
It's not a question of ideology or technology, but of resources.
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body:

Today we focus on one of the very obvious effects of IPv6: saving
resources and thus money. This post is part of the
[how IPv6 changes the world](/u/blog/how-ipv6-changes-the-world/)
series.


## The general way of saving money with IPv6

Economically, the less of something exists, the more expensive it
is. There is only one Mona Lisa and that one is quite
expensive. Similar if you move out of a city
(like to
[Digital
Glarus](https://hack.digitalglarus.ch/hacking-and-living-in-hotel-diesbach.html)),
rent become more affordable.

As stated in the previous post, it has gotten quite expensive for companies
to acquire IPv4 address space and
[the prices are
rising](https://www.retevia.net/address-pricing-2019-and-beyond/).
Compared to what we paid 2 years ago, the
**market price is now 600% as high**.

So as a company like us, when the cost is rising, we transparently
forward the price increase to the end users to stay profitable.

So if you opt out of IPv4, we don't need to buy more space and neither
of us needs to spend money on it.

## Most services work without IPv4

And this brings me to the question of what one can do without an
explicit IPv4 address. And the answer is: almost everything you could
do with an IPv4 address.

Here at ungleich we spent quite some time to allow a seamless
migration to an IPv4 free world:

* If you want your server to be reachable from the IPv4 Internet,
  you can use our [IPv4-to-IPv6
  Proxy](https://redmine.ungleich.ch/projects/open-infrastructure/wiki/How_to_use_the_IPv4-to-IPv6-Proxy),
  which even works with HTTPS.
* If you want to access something via IPv6, but you don't have IPv6
  connectivity, we can provide you with an [IPv6
  VPN](https://ipv6vpn.ch), which works even through CGNAT. It is also
  free, if you have any VPS running from [IPv6OnlyHosting](https://ipv6onlyhosting.com).!

There are rare exceptions of things that do not yet fully work, but
we even work on these cases.

## Saving money #1: IPv6 only VPS

One of the most obvious gains is, if you decide to go with
[IPv6 only VPS](https://ipv6onlyhosting.com/), because there you are
directly rewarded more affordable prices.

Be it Google, ungleich or our friends at
[mythic beasts](https://www.mythic-beasts.com/), we are all in the
same situation that IPv4 addresses cost us money.

As a user, you even have the ability influence this
development: the more IPv6 only services you consume and the less you
rely on IPv4, the more it becomes the standard and the less everyone
is depending on IPv4. It's a positive feedback cycle.

## Saving money #2: Going IPv6 only

Another very simple case is the network management in SMB and even
enterprises. The bigger you are, the more networks you have to manage
and in our experience, dual stack networks (IPv6+IPv4) are no fun to
maintain and have rather high complexity when it comes to security /
ACLs/ firewalling.

However you will need IPv6 in your network eventually anyway. So the
strategy that we recommend is to switch directly to IPv6 only
networks.

This way your network planning becomes significantly easier, also in
comparison to IPv4 networks. You don't have to spend a lot of time
into network planning anymore, as you can use a /64 for every
individual networks.

This way you reduce complexity and are future proven at the same time.

## Saving money #3: Not using the cloud

Another interesting aspect with IPv6 is to avoid cloud services at
all. Instead of uploading your data somewhere and having somebody else
downloading it again, you can easily share data or communicate with
other employees directly using IPv6.

## Saving money #4: The IPv6 Black Friday

At the moment we run a special IPv6 promotion campaign
named [Black IPv6
Friday](https://swiss-crowdfunder.com/campaigns/black-ipv6-friday?locale=en)
at which you can even get up to 50% discount on the already more
affordable IPv6 only products.

## More money saving?

If you think we missed an opportunity to save money with IPv6, let us
know on the [IPv6 Chat](https://ipv6.chat) and we will add the hint
for others.