 Hello. Well, it's great to have a chance to speak to you guys. And I'm actually based here in Singapore, so I don't have any jet lag to blame anything on. But hopefully, you'll find this interesting. This is a little different from the other talks here. It's kind of deep in the networking stack, but it impacts what you do with web hosting dramatically. And in fact, a lot of people say, IPv6. This is a really obscure topic, very dry. In reality, we're at the verge of a third generation of the global internet. The first generation was ARPANET, which had 8-bit addresses. And maybe 10,000 people total ever used it. And it lasted from 1969, 50 years ago, to 1983. And so it started. The first four nodes of ARPANET were connected together. About the time Armstrong was taking his troll on the moon. And so a lot of people don't realize how far back the internet really goes. But that was the first generation. And they actually had things like email and file transfer and so on. But of course, they didn't have web. But basically, with 8-bits, you can only have 256 nodes. At the time, a node was like a mainframe computer with hundreds of users. So it's a little different from today. But 8-bits, they ran out of that pretty quickly. So the second generation of the internet is what most people are using today. That's IPv4. And it was actually first went live, January 1, 1983. And it's still widely used. But starting around the mid-90s, we basically broke it horribly. Because we were running out of public addresses, where they were all going to be gone by 2000 at the rate we were putting them out. And so the IETF came up with a couple of workarounds. One was network address translation. Another is called private addresses. And actually, if you read the RFC, it's addresses for private internets. And so we actually fractured the global internet into millions of little private internets, each one of which is hiding behind one real public address. Basically, IPv6 was actually originally specified in 1995. And it's really only going live in the last few years, because people realize that IPv4 is really at end of life. It's dying. And so we've got to replace it. The good news is this makes some enormous changes in the way things work. There's now an essentially unlimited number of global addresses. You don't really have to go to a web hosting facility anymore to get a public address. You could have 1,000 public addresses in your own house with no problem, each one with a little raspberry pi running a website. You could have a website running on your phone if you really wanted to. I'm not sure why anybody would want to do that, but you could port a patchy to Android and have a website running on your phone. I'm planning to make a FTP server that runs on my phone here shortly. I'm also working on software that goes directly from my phone to yours with no intermediary server. This revolutionizes the way things work. And so I'm going to give you a little talk about this and how it impacts hosting and so on. As I mentioned, I've been around about 45 years in the field. And I'm working on my fifth venture now, Sixscape. My third one was actually in the US in 2000 to 2006. We went from six people in my basement to 250 people and sold for $273 million. And so I'm a serial entrepreneur. I wrote a book on IPv6 back in 2010 and posted it on the global IPv6 forum website. It's been downloaded about a half million times so far. So I'm somewhat of an authority in this field. I've got two websites that, if you're interested in digging deeper into what's going on, are out there. And one of them is called thirdinternet.com and one of them is called v6edu.com. The second one is really for people who are very serious about this, network engineers and so on. I've got people hitting these sites from all over the world. And of course, they run on WordPress. OK. So now, in the TCPIP network stack, there's actually four layers. I'm not going to go into too much detail on this and there's no quiz at the end. The top layer is application layer. That's where most of the protocols you're familiar with live, like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and so on. Next layer down is transport, where TCP and UDP live. And finally, we get down to the layer where IP lives. And so this is pretty obscure, something buried that deep in the internet, but it makes an enormous impact. The bottom layer is the link layer, which is where things like ethernet and Wi-Fi live. We're not going to worry too much about that. OK. So basically, IP lives in that next to bottom layer and it uses IP addresses. The old style, IPv4, looks like 123.45.67.89. You've seen most of your life. The new ones look a little strange. First off, it's 128-bit addresses, which means there's 340 trillion, trillion, trillion possible global addresses. We ain't going to run out this time. But basically, we organize a little bit. Instead of four groups of decimal digits from 0 to 255, it's now eight groups of hex digits, four digits each group. And so we have letters in our numbers now, which confuses some people, but it's just Bay 16. So don't get worried if your addresses now start having letters A through F in them. That's just Bay 16. But anyway, most software never uses IP directly, but only indirectly through the socket API, which is what Apache uses and so on. And the transport layers, like TCP or EDP. But IP determines the number of bits in the IP addresses, which in turn determines the number of addresses. IPv4 had a total of 4.3 billion. We've got 20 billion people using the internet today. Huh, how did that happen? Well, they had to go through network address translation and create private internets that basically are very much like having a PBX in an office phone system. You don't have a real phone number. You've got an extension. And so mostly addresses you're working with now are extensions. So when you go to host your site, basically you don't have any public addresses at home. I'm sorry, those have been gone for years. In fact, a lot of people don't even have more than one or two at their office. And so it's getting more and more difficult to host site because in order for you to have a site that anybody can connect to, you've got to have a public address. And those are just about gone in IPv4 now. So they're even sharing public addresses now. Hosting sites, when you put your site up, you don't have your own IPv4 address. You're sharing it with 100 or 1,000 other people. And you can only get at that site through the URL, not through an IP address. And so this complicates things. And interestingly enough, going through that network address translation server and now two layers of it with what's called carrier grade net, that slows things down. So IPv6 is faster. If you want a really fast website, deploy it on IPv6. It'll speed up 20% or 30% just because it's on IPv6. So that's one thing that might get your attention. But anyway, basically the public addresses in IPv4 have been gone since February 3, 2011 at the IANA level. And since then, at the regional internet registry levels like APNIC and so on, they've run out one after another. So now, when an ISP runs out of IPv4 addresses, there's no more being made. And so the IANA and APNIC and so on tell them, how about try IPv6? They've been telling them that for a long time. And a lot of them are finally beginning to do that. OK, now, there we go. OK, so IPv4 has been around since 1983. It's completely out of address. It sits on life support at this point. And this is what probably everybody in here is hosting their websites on except me. But anyway, IPv6 is a successor protocol. It's created by the ITF, first specified in 95, finally going live. It does pretty much the same thing, but there's an almost unlimited number of public addresses. And there's a lot of other improvements to it, too. But even a phone, my phone has IPv6 from M1. I've got two to the 64th addresses on here. That's 18 quintillion times as many as in the entire current internet. My phone has that on it. And in fact, I've got IPv6 running on my note here because I'm getting it in through M1 and sharing a hotspot. This computer now has IPv6, even though I'm sorry, the site doesn't. But anyway, basically, we're now in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. And we're at about 28%. 28% of all the traffic on the global internet is now over IPv6. In the next year or two, that's going to go over 50%. Because you've probably heard of 5G. 5G is over IPv6. 5G foams. And so as 5G is deployed, it's going to turn to a mostly IPv6 internet with shrinking islands of IPv4. We're in the final days of IPv4. Get with it, guys. Start supporting the future here. Okay, now, basically, let's see. I don't really need to go into the private addresses and so on, but this will give you a good idea here. In a business office, you have a real telephone number and a PBX. And behind that, you have extensions, like extension 101, extension 102, and so on. Those are not real telephone numbers. Nobody can call it directly. And in fact, when you're making an outgoing call, if you've got 10 real phone numbers in that company, only 10 people can be making outgoing calls, even if you have 1,000 people. Level 1 tries to make an outgoing call. Dialing 9, they get a busy signal. So there's a lot of problems with PBXs, but the alternative is too expensive having a real phone number for each employee. Well, NAT is the same way. NAT basically has one real address and then a lot of extension addresses behind it. People are confused because they look like they're real addresses. They used to be. They got repurposed to be extensions, basically. And so when you have something in there, basically, it cannot make any outgoing connection itself, or sorry, it can make an outgoing, but you can't make an in-going connection to an internal one. And so you can't have a website running on your home computer. There's no way for anybody to connect to that computer from outside. So today, if you want to host a WordPress website, you've got to take it to a colo facility or a web host or whatever. They've got a handful of IPv4 addresses and they do some very strange things which slow it down even more to actually access the different servers that they're hosting. With IPv6, everybody can have a native address, a real public address, and there's no slowing down. There's an interesting little company called MythicBeast out there that has rack full of rack full of little Raspberry Pis, each of which is running its own copy of Linux and has a unique IPv6 address. And they'll host stuff on there for £2.50 British a month because one of the main costs at a hosting facility now is these ancient and incredibly scarce IPv4 addresses. So if you can get around having that, have IPv6 only hosting, you save a lot of money and it works dramatically better. So again, we're at the final days there. So you can pay a hosting facility a lot more money and get a dedicated IPv4 address which they charge a lot for and then publish that in DNS, then anybody can get to your site, you don't have to worry about sharing your address with anybody else. But that's getting harder and harder because the hosting facilities are all out of IPv4 addresses. They're getting more and more difficult to do that. But anyway, there are a few hosting facilities now that support IPv6. Some of the sponsors here today do that. Talk with exabytes, I believe it is. So they'll be happy to provide you with IPv6 hosting. And I happen to use Vodian here in Singapore. I've got three websites, one for my company and two personal ones that I run that are running over IPv6. And it was very easy to set up. I really didn't have to do that much work to get it to work. So when you go to host your site, one of the most important questions is do you support IPv6? A lot of the current ones are gonna say no. But the ones that have an eye to the future and so on, sure, we got it, no additional charge. Because the addresses are free unlike IPv4 because they're not scarce, there's trillions of them. Okay, so basically that's one of the things you should do. And a lot of the hosting people say, oh, well, I haven't had anybody ask for it yet. People don't know to ask for it. They've never heard of IPv6. So ask them, start creating the demand. Okay, now, you don't host it on just IPv6 unless you're doing something very unusual. You do what's called dual stack. And so the IPv4, which is what most people would connect to would be through the layer after layer of NAT, running slow, having technical problems and so on. The people that are up to speed will have IPv6 and they'll connect to the IPv6 and things work much better. You say, well, how many people have IPv6 right now? Well, about 28% of the people in the world today have IPv6 and probably don't even know it. And so basically, if you go to Mythic Beast, they'll be happy to provide you with IPv6 only hosting but you would be cutting out a lot of your customers if you did that today. One interesting thing is telephones are where IPv6 is really taking off. In the US, 90 to 95% of the telephones are already on IPv6. Many of them IPv6 only. And they used some cute technology to allow the ancient legacy IPv4 only apps to still run. So anyway, basically, what do you need to change in your web app to support IPv6? The short answer is nothing. Basically, the hosting company has to be running both IPv4 and IPv6. The addresses have to be published in DNS. Apache has to be configured to support both protocols. Your hosting provider can easily do all of that. So basically, one of the neat things is once you've got Apache configured correctly, anything running on it, including WordPress and your applications, require no changes whatever. So you can be up on to speed just by finding a hosting provider that supports IPv6. No changes to your site, whatever. Now, if you've got IPv6 at home, you can actually run as many public websites as you want. I've got IPv6 at home. I've had it since about 2004, but okay, I'm a little odd. But basically, in Singapore today, some of the wired internet providers are supporting IPv6. Ask around and get one that does. So how do you find IPv6 web hosters? Google it. You'll notice there's something like 4.12 million responses to that. So this is not something that is unheard of. There's a lot of people doing this. And it doesn't matter where your website is hosted, of course. Okay, you can also use Cloudflare as a CDN. They automatically migrate or convert all websites to IPv6. So that's the easy way to do it. Just get Cloudflare as a CDN. Here's the proof that it's actually taking off. These are the people who are hitting Google.com over IPv6. You can see starting around 2014, it really started rising rapidly. We're at 28% as of January 2019. And it's going up even faster now. So basically, it's here. It's no longer future technology. It's the present technology. Okay, a lot of countries like Belgium is already up to 64%, Switzerland 53%, and so on. The internet core is at 80%. So it's really taking off. On the global content, these are the top 10,000 websites. 61% of them are running IPv6. It's on phones too. This is my Android phone and my iPhone. You can see they both have real IPv4 addresses. And one interesting thing is if I actually try to ping those addresses from anywhere else, like from my Windows computer, it works. Those are real global addresses, unlike phones. Up to now, phones have only had private addresses and they could only make outgoing connections. Very shortly here, as people start getting IPv6 on their phones, you can run servers on your phone if you want to. Now, most are all 5G phone providers who will be supporting IPv6. So that's something to look forward to. And for more information, I've got two websites. Again, thirdinternet.com is the third generation of the global internet. A lot of advocacy, deployment stats, the vision of what's coming, and so on. Feel free to check it out. It's free. It's being hit by people all over the world now, as you'll see on the next slide. And then v6edu.com is really the hardcore stuff for the network engineers. Probably most of the people in here won't need that. But people like the top telco engineers at Singtel and so on, I trained a lot of them in this. And it's that information that's there. And again, that's being hit from all over the world. Okay, there's my coverage map on thirdinternet.com. You can see it's really being hit by a lot of people. And so not so much in Africa, but some. But most of the rest of the world is fairly well covered. Anyway, okay, so that's basically what I want to tell you. I strongly recommend you look into it. Again, there's almost no effort involved in this. Find yourself a hosting provider that supports IPv6. Use them, you're done. Or just go through a content provider, like Cloudflare in particular. And so it's not a tricky thing to do. And it's gonna become more and more important. Eventually, we're gonna run out of IPv4, even for home with shared and so on. And so people are gonna start getting much cheaper internet by getting only IPv6. Once that starts happening, if your site is only on IPv4, they ain't gonna be able to reach you. So just here's fair warning, it's coming. So basically, I hope that gave you some interesting insight that there's a major revolution underway right now. It's no longer future, it's happening. And it impacts how you host these sites. So let's see, just one quick last thing here, basically just to show you. If I go to, this is testipv6.com. Sure enough, right in here, I've actually got full working IPv6, and there's my address. And let's see, also if I go to my thirdinternet.com site, well that's v6edu. Let me go to thirdinternet.com. Okay, so right there, this is the PHP function that shows your current IP address of the person connecting to you. As you can see, I'm connecting from IPv6 right from in here in this room. And in order to do that again, I had to use a hotspot on my phone because the wifi here is in IPv6. But anyway, so there's no change at all to my code or to the WordPress. That's just standard WordPress running at Vodian, okay? All right, any quick questions? Yes. What? Are you recommending to the IPv6 policy? No, I'm recommending you the dual stack right now, which is what most of the hosting providers are providing. Have both IPv4 and IPv6. And so basically they add an IPv6 address to your existing site. No change is required. But now people will be able to access it if they've got only IPv6. So the client side doesn't have IPv6 when they even connect? Yes, they'll connect to the old legacy IPv4. But eventually there's gonna be people that have only IPv6. Because it's just getting too expensive to keep IPv4 on life support. So more and more of it's gonna be shut down over the next few years. In fact, there's a group at the ITF called IPv4 Sunset, which is how to cleanly and painlessly put IPv4 to sleep. Okay. And so we don't want to disrupt things too much. But yeah, IPv6 is the future. We'll probably have it till around 2100 or so. So you won't have to go through this pain again anytime soon. I don't have to worry about that. Okay, good question though. So what does it mean in the context of your own internet? Do you have a number of your own? Okay, basically my own internet provider at home is my republic. They don't have IPv6 for home networks yet. So I had to actually get a special router, configure it, and I tunnel in IPv6 from a company called Hurricane Electric in the US. So if anybody wants to do that, the complete details and how you set everything up is on thirdinternet.com. There's a lot of recipes on there on how to do things, including how to do IPv6 on AWS. But StarHub and I think M1 are already doing IPv6 at home and on their wired networks. And so just when you go to sign up for an ISP, ask them, do you have IPv6? Someone will say IPv what? And others will say, yeah, we've had it for years. So go for one that's had it for years. Okay. What can we get up in? What? How do you use this when you're at a commended IPv6 at home? What benefits do you get for the price? I've got gigabit. What? You say bandwidth? No, benefits. Oh, benefits. Well, first off, I develop a lot of IPv6 software at the office. And so I've got IPv6 running there too. I have since, again, 2004. And so I have to have IPv6 to test things on and so on. At home, I actually now, every node in my home, I can access from anywhere in the world. I could bring up RDP here and talk to my computer on my desk at home, even though it's not, it doesn't have any public IPv4 address. It's got a public IPv6. And so there's a lot of advantages to running IPv6 at home. And you can actually run multiple subnets. You could have one for the parents, one for the kids, one for your smart TV, isolate them and so on. So you don't have to worry about somebody getting in your smart TV and seeing the rest of your network. So there's a lot of advanced things you can do with IPv6. Eventually, everybody will have it. But right now, it's kind of transition. I have a question. Your site is hosted on bogey.com, right? Yes. So it's mine, but how do you make yours IPv6? I can't mine it out. By default, you go get IPv6 there. You have to kind of twist their arm right now. Eventually, they'll probably give it to everyone. But if you call them up and say, I want IPv6 on my site, they might grumble a little bit, but they'll give it to you at no additional charge. OK. There are other web site hosted that just include it by default. I believe Exopite. I'm not sure. You can ask them. They're out there. I believe they support IPv6 for their facilities. I guess I can use my own site for them. Yeah. Basically, once your hosting facility turns it on for you, you don't have to make any changes. You're on the third internet. And anybody will be able to connect to you over IPv6. And of course, also through the legacy stuff with the NAT in the way and so on. But the IPv6 will actually be higher performance. Has that made you don't have to buy a program? No, you still need domains. Domains are kind of above the level of IP. But in DNS, you can actually provide what's called a quad A record for the IPv6 and an A record for the IPv4. And when somebody connects whichever one IPv6 or IPv4, it'll find you and connect. You still need a domain, though. Yeah. You have both the IPv6 address and the IPv4 address. And the client will get the right one and connect. I don't know if we've got more time, but we've got more questions, apparently. Yeah. I've got a machine that's running 10 websites right now. Yeah. The IPv4. And I wouldn't go on IP. And they're all running on the rotators. Yeah. So with IPv6, does that mean that I would have? Each one could have a global address on one machine. Unlike IPv4, where you can only have one address per machine. With IPv6, I can have as many public addresses as I want on one computer. OK. So yeah, you could easily have each one have a unique public address, even without having multiple machines or virtual machines or whatever. The what? Host headers. Host headers. Do they deal with an IPv6? I think they do. And in fact, some of the hosting providers that are providing IPv6, believe it or not, they're sharing IPv6 addresses, because that's the way they know to do things. And so they really don't need to do that. They could provide each customer with a unique IPv6 address per website. And then there's no question of whether you have a shared address or a private address or a dedicated one or whatever. All IPv6 addresses should be dedicated. There's no excuse for sharing an IPv6 address. It's like sharing a grain of sand at the beach. So OK. I'll be around the rest of today. And also, I'll be around tomorrow. If you have any other questions about this, this is free consulting guys. I'm a world-class IPv6 expert, also security. So feel free to ask questions. I'll be glad to answer. And I've enjoyed speaking to you. I hope you got something interesting out of this.