IPv6 explanation

One of the most commonly used buzz-words of the last few years is IPv6. It is sometimes even comparable to the "Milleniumbug" that would supposedly let many systems crash at the transition to the year 2000.

However, IPv6 is a technique that does matter. You will find more information below.

In the beginning of the Internet, a list was maintained with 'hostnames' of the machines that were connected. When the Internet in the 80s began to grow, it was too much work to maintain it that way.

At that time, DNS (Domain Name System) was put to use. Via DNS a domain name is converted to an IP address.

In the first instance, the 32-bit IPv4 system was used. An example of a 32-bit IP address is 91.195.80.45. Because 32-bit IP addresses are available, IPv4 can contain 2³² addresses, or 4,294,967,296 different IP addresses. Since there were only 5,000 systems connected at the introduction, it was thought to have plenty of addresses.

With the rapidly increasing number of people and machines on the Internet however, the number of available IPv4 addresses decreased fast. Currently, there are only a few available.
Because technicians obviously saw this coming, they soon started working on the successor of IPv4, namely IPv6. IPv6 is 128 bits, and thus includes 2¹²⁸ = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 different addresses. This number should be enough for a long time; per person in the world there are more IPv6 addresses available than there are IPv4 addresses in total.

Because there are so many IPv6 addresses available, now each site and each device may have its own IPv6 address.

An example IPv6 address is: 2A00:1CA8:0015:0000:0000:0000:0000:0045. IPv6 addresses may be abbreviated, with the largest series of zeros replaced by colons. Also zeros at the beginning of a section may be omitted. This IP address can therefore also be written as: 2A00:1CA8:15::45.

TotallyHosted has the following IPv6-range:

• 2A00:1CA8:15::/48

Customers of TotallyHosted can get a shared IPv4 address and an unique IPv6 address for their own website. These can be used next to eachother.