What does it mean? And how can you better use our VPS services?
Hello. On this article, I’ll briefly explain our stance on being an IPv6-first company, and our set of priorities when configuring a VPS – or, indeed, a server.
One of the biggest questions C-Servers had at the beginning of the brand’s trade was due to the fact that we had IPv6 – and solely IPv6. Many users got interested on our VPS services, considering their great price, the assurance of a household name like Hetzner’s for a dedicated server, and their excellent performance. However, one big caveat existed – our users had limited connectivity to the world.
Because the current world we live in is not yet an IPv6-full world, or even a dual-stack one, customers would have one of our VPSes, have it for a few days, find that, depending on the intended distro for their usage, it could potentially be difficult or impossible to use it in a certain way (e.g. having to edit mirrors for IPv6-enabled ones), and essentialy find about 40-50% of the Internet was inaccessible. And then, the CHURN began – customers requested cancellations. Not many, but an enough relevant percentage (roughly 30%) for us to understand the market – and seek alternative solutions.
Solutions and challenges: always a classic
First, we’ve chosen to adopt NAT64. This immediately solved one of the biggest issues with customers, especially under Enterprise Linux, around the 1st week of June (2024). Now, customers were fully able to access the Internet as they intended to, with the website compatibility percentage dramatically improving from around 50% coverage to 99+%. And our cancellation rates plummeted by nearly half, reducing to just 16% of the global total.
However, we always wanted to have more – we were still losing 1 out of 6 customers to the competition. And customers did, as well, when they found using some applications did not support IPv6 or they wanted to communicate with IPv4-primary or IPv4-only hosts. And finally, between the 1st and the 3rd week of October – not without its’ fair share of challenges – the last round of innovation came up to solve these issues. For the first time at C-Servers, and for the first time on a company, not only NAT64 existed – but also NAT46, a flavor of NAT IPv4, in it’s full glory, implemented under a socat solution that bridged the server’s IPv4 to the customer’s IPv6, worked automatically socket-to-socket, and was implemented massively.
And our cancellation rates, again, plummeted, dramatically reducing to where we are today, at around only 2-3% of CHURN. A great rate, I believe, for an IPv6-first company, and surely one of the best in the industry. Of course, there are competitors at 0%, but those don’t give refunds, and honestly, I wouldn’t feel comfortable knowing I would have an unsatisfied customer in our hands that went by without these.
But what does IPv6-first mean?
First and foremost, means that we prioritize IPv6-first companies, and users, as well. Of course I invest my resources, my time, and the company’s money wherever necessary – but this also does mean that I have to prioritize exactly where it is invested. I don’t want the company’s money to run out before, and sure does it feel stupid to me to be asked to pay around 110-120 USD (at the time of writing), or more, for a mere pack of 255 IPv4 addresses. It’s a rate that, like we say where we live for anything this expensive, “eats with us at home” – because you invest hundreds on a server, or get a great deal on renting at any datacenter, and then you have to pay two or three times that amount for a pack of… addresses?! Why? Solely because they’re IPv4?
I’ll put this straight for our customers and anyone that gets through this blog post – for me, addresses are addresses. And no more than that. They’re no more valuable than a piece of paper that says where a VPS or a server lives, in the exact same way that we have our regular e-mails and not many customers pay them; or we have our regular physical houses where we live, or work, and we don’t pay a rent merely to have an address displayed. If dematerialization is a reality, why do I have to materialize a cost so high like this, when I have a neighbour next door – the IPv6 addresses – not only correctly tailored to today’s world, but also tailored to the future world as well?
Dual stack needs to be an absolute reality. And massive-scale deployments, like servers (either ours or of anyone, really), ISP’s networks, and several others, absolutely must prioritize IPv6. The address is longer, different, harder? Possibly. But as with all things human, it’s just a question of ourselves getting used to it. When IPv4 addresses came around, the challenge was simple: most didn’t understand what these were for, their logic or reasoning. Fast-forward some 30 years, and we are now at the stance that, every day, many more users understand and care about networking, and are solely experiencing difficulties with this. The human brain evolves, and learns. And will also learn about this.
It absolutely blows my mind, therefore, that some companies implement badly their IPv6 – looking at you with the no-route issue, GitHub. This unnecessarily puts things more difficult than they already are for these users. I didn’t want to have a dedicated Knowledge Base article just for this, it’s absurd – but the tickets were so many I had to do one with a workaround. It’s insane.
This obviously doesn’t mean we won’t ever have a full-stack VPS service, on IPv4+IPv6 with full addresses on both. I do expect and aim to have one of those managed by me soon. But these are not priority to C-Servers. We prioritize innovation, wherever we find possible, every day – IPv6 resembles exactly that. And IPv4… well… it’s from the past. These won’t disappear, but, I believe, pressure will eventually dissipate, corporation interest on these will also decline as well and, little by little, we will be at the standpoint where: everyone must get a dual-stack, most users will be at IPv6+IPv4 or solely IPv6, and IPv4 addresses will start to be so inexpensive that all the world will converge, first, into a dual-stack, and then on eliminating IPv4 – and embrace the future.
At C-Servers, therefore, you are experiencing the future today.
Tiago Pereira
Systems Administrator
C-Servers by Centerfield Ltd