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IPv6 Only Cloud Server (v6node.com)
139 points by canvayio on July 29, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 92 comments


I will never buy hosting (and trust it with personal data) from a website with no information on the company behind it. All legal information you provide are in a Notion file?! The place which would make the company address public is the Data Processing Agreement, which is "talk to us". It seems like you want to intentionally hide your legal entity, which isn’t very trustworthy.

Edit: The ToS say "The Website is offered by canvay.io, located in Karlsruhe, Germany". Dude, with all due respect, get your shit together. As a German citizen/company, you MUST publish an imprint with a company address, a VAT etc. [1].

It looks like a genuinely nice service, but it is just a matter of time until someone sends you a cease-and-desist order, which will be a lot more expensive than getting a proper imprint. And also, you'll earn more trust.

If you incorporated as a sole proprietator and want to protect your private address, sign up for a desk at a local coworking space and put that address online.

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht


Thank you for your notice, this was definitely not the intention, I've added the contact details as well as VAT ID to the legal page


Hetzner Cloud let’s you deselect the option to get an IPv4 address and they’ll reduce the price.


Thank you so much for this news! I have completely missed it. I've been scaling with terraform for so long, I didn't login to the dashboard to see the news pop-up. This is great, not only can you drop IPv4, you can also drop both IPs and have a private network only VPS. I've got my weekend work cut-out :) In case someone is wondering, the price reduction for dropping IPv4 (no price change in dropping IPv6) is 0.60 EUR (including 19% VAT)


If you're using a dedicated server the IPv6-only option is like 2-5€ depending on server (and auction), so definitely worth in all cases.


Looking at the ASN of this company, it would appear they are reselling Hetzner nodes with IPv4 disabled.


I experimented with an IPv6-only home network some time ago. It's worth remembering that DNS64 + NAT64 only help you connect to IPv4-only hosts that you resolved through DNS. Anything that gets its IPs another way, say a BitTorrent client that gets peer IPs from trackers / DHT, or something that insists on using DNS-over-HTTPS to some other unforgeable DNS server, will be unable to connect to v4 IPs.

That said, it's not clear if these VMs have outbound NAT for IPv4 or not. If they do, then what I wrote above won't be a problem.


Hey!

Founder here, yep you're totally right, BitTorrent and this kind of application won't work as there's no outbound NAT. It's on the todo list however.

Bu pretty much everything else works just fine, e.g. hosting docker containers, Webservers, databases..

Cheers Ian


>It's on the todo list however

I'm curious, how would you support this usecase?


I'm no datacenter host but NAT64 solutions exist (and have existed for a long time, actually). More recently, 464XLAT seems to be actively implemented, fixing many of the shortcomings of individual workarounds.

Your server won't be reachable over IPv4 from the outside, but it'll work to access most IPv4 exclusive services.

Alternatively, simple carrier grade NAT, possibly using 4over6, can also work. You would provide servers with an internal IPv4 address that would get NAT'ed just like on residential homes.


You can run this on linux to get ipv4 on all types of connections: https://github.com/toreanderson/clatd

Most other OSes like Windows also have a built in CLAT implementation that works similarly.


I did notice that about half of the connections on a regular bittorrent session seems to be IPv6, so I'd expect it to work fine, although perhaps a bit slower since there are less hosts you can connect to.


Another thing to consider is that if you're torrenting you might already be going through a VPN so if you can get a v6 address to tunnel through you can get v4 traffic going through the VPN interface that way. I use WireGuard forwarding with v6-only boxes (they don't torrent, though)


It looks like they're based on Hetzner. I would guess they are building on Hetzner's dedicated servers. Not that that's a bad thing, I'm a big fan of their dedicated servers.

Source: The IP listed in one of their examples is 2a01:4f8:a0:380b::1. If you lookup the ASN it points to Hetzner.


I am using Hetzner servers too, and I am happy with them.


I've been a customer of Hetzner for several years, and I couldn't be happier with their services


I am an IPv6 maxi (and I love to see this, it’s great), but even I had to chuckle at this line:

> or ask your ISP to enable IPv6 on your network

Try pulling that with Bell Canada. It’s not coming and they don’t care.

(For context, I am behind @BellNoIPv6 on twitter)


I asked RCN for IPv6 every year or two since 2010 at dslreports. They've changed their name to Astound, since then. It may be Astounding, but they still have no IPv6.

It's OK. I've decided that even when my house has IPv6 native, the Hurricane Electric tunnel is still quite useful to me. Static addresses are always nicer than dynamic.


I understand the sentiment, but I won’t accept the latency penalty. ISPs shouldn’t be doing dynamic prefix assignments anyway because it breaks too much.


Depending on lots of things, it's easily possible that IPv6 via a he.net tunnel gets you better routing than via your carrier directly. I haven't tested, but my current ISP is stingy at peering, and HE.net is well connected on ipv6. They've got a tunnel endpoint at the large internet exchange in the big city near me and my ISP runs all of my traffic through there anyway. Of course, my ISP doesn't run native IPv6, so 6rd vs a configured tunnel is the same overhead; if there were native v6, you do save 20? bytes per packet, which can be significant.


Mythic Beasts have been offering v6 only for years on their virtual and dedicated hosts - I've got a VPS with them with only v6, no point in paying for v4 if I don't need it.

They point out that offering v4 as a separate line item leads to conversations with accountants about "what's this line item, and do you actually need it?"


>They point out that offering v4 as a separate line item leads to conversations with accountants about "what's this line item, and do you actually need it?"

"Yes, if we don't have it, we can't reach ~60% of the world's Internet users."


Maybe it is still a fair question for machines that should only be reachable by other machines you fully own (like database servers and so on)? Just thinking out loud.


Or if you’re putting Cloudflare or another CDN in front anyway


Why would those machines need any public IP address, be it IPv4 or IPv6? I'm not sure if we have a single database server with a public IP address.


OP is talking about VPS servers someone _other_ (eg. Hetzner) runs, I think.


Hetzner VPS instances don't need to have public IP addresses.

>Assign Primary IPs to your server to establish a connection to the internet. Or create a private-network-only cloud server by not adding any Primary IPs at all. You can change the selected network option at any time.


I was just telling a friend that I had an idea for a public cloud:

Management API is Kubernetes only, similar to AKS or EKS.

Networking is IPv6 only, public routeable all the way down to individual pods.

Only entire physical servers can be requested as nodes.

The only other services available are the bare essentials: IPv4 to IPv6 ingress, DNS, key vault, and blob storage.


V6 direct to pod is sort of antithetical to k8s though because you’re exposing an ephemeral endpoint directly to users.


Yeah, most people assume that pods are not exposed to the Internet so you'd probably want to block that. But using GUA addresses for pods is a good idea because it eliminates NAT and overlapping IPs.


Doesn't mean you have to expose it. V6 direct to ClusterIP/LoadBalancerIP/ExternalIP makes more sense and CNIs like Calico have this functionality as a first-class citizen.


Why would you not firewall those off? You could use different subnets for internal traffic and exposed deployments just like you can on IPv4. It's all just a naming scheme more than anything, though it's one which you can make work across firewalls if you disable enough firewall rules on both sides.

Functionally, there's little difference between a private /8 or a DHCPv6 /64 except that you can serve even more hosts.


That's a nice solution for compute, but what about state? PVs and some type of rds are pretty hard to do without(if you only have ephemeral nodes).


This would be pretty amazing if you could price it right.

I don’t think AWS will maintain its dominance organically forever. Cracks are already showing. There are too many expensive managed services; maybe fine if you have the budget, but for cash starved startups? Maybe a dead simple cloud provider that goes 90% of the way is good enough.


Yeah, I just looked into setting up a private CA to avoid having to store the private key manually, and it’s like $400 per month. I’m just not going to pay that. Comes in cheaper to pay someone to take a USB stick to a bank safe and fetch me that anytime I need to sign a cert…


Having just gone through that for the company I work for, a cloud based HSM that is compliant and attested for the key storage and an API around issuing/revoking/auditing certificates would cost a lot more.

So you're not paying for the private key storage, you could do that in AWS KMS for like $1/month. You're paying for the CA API.


But what if I don’t even need a HSM, but just somebody to store a CA certificate for me? Even if they just put it onto some storage and encrypt it with a KMS key, that’s more than enough for a vast amount of use cases. I don’t need government grade security. I just have some internal services that need to use a trusted certificate, and don’t want to maintain a server with storage myself, just for that.

I could build that service in a weekend(tm)!


So encrypt it with KMS and store it in S3.


Can't you archive that in all major cloud providers?


The service looks really cool!

Your website says you're planning to put servers in the U.S. - wanted to plug Dedipath: https://dedipath.com/

I'm completely unaffiliated but I had a chat with their CTO Ernie Quick a few weeks back. They seem like a cool team, are pretty reasonable with how they approach billing and network, and they cover the initial rack and stack if you mail them the hardware. They're also the only colo provider I found servicing my area that offers upfront pricing in a Digital Ocean style web UI which I thought was cool!



Hetzner does not provide colo services in the U.S. according to their website


https://veil-phone-04b.notion.site/Sub-Processor-List-c3baed... has the list of hosting services that they use under the hood


The annual billing toggle doesn't seem to do anything. You may want to advertise the service on lowendbox.com since this seems up their alley.


The reverse proxy is a nice idea. Any reason not to offer a "get a TCP port redirected to you" in a similar fashion? E.g. I run a VPN server for my mobile clients (wireguard), which sometimes only have IPv4 connectivity (e.g. office wifi). A 9 Euro node with an IPv6 and one random-but-static IPv4 TCP port would be enough for that, while the pure IPv6 node sadly wouldn't work for that.

You could put it in tiers: S gets 1 port, M 4, L 16, XL 64,...; or something like "get a chunk of 50 ports for 1 Euro/y extra"; or combination of both.


Yup, that's next on my list. I'm going to roll out larger fully routed IPv6 subnets first, then follow with port forwarding later


You might want to post it on lowendtalk and lowendspirit, they love this stuff.

Also, there are cheaper options without NAT64 (really IPv6 only).

https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/3981/nl-ipv6-only-kvm-vp...


Dumb question. Is the IPV6 adoption sufficiently advanced at this point to handle only IPV6?

Will the client's local machine/browser, DNS, and all the routers in between be able to handle a full IPV6 connection with no IPV4?

Or will I have to run a tunnel of some sort?


It totally depends, to be honest. There are countries/ ISP with a very high IPv6 adoption, but also some that don't care at all.

The idea is to use the built-in reverse proxy for proxying HTTP(S) requests and provide an IPv4 + IPv6 endpoint for your domain.

That means your end users won't even notice the server is running on IPv6 only

Google has some interesting stats on the IPv6 adoption rate: https://www.google.de/ipv6/statistics.html


Thanks for the info.

Do you know if the average person in America will be able to access an IPV6 site from a browser without a reverse proxy of any sort?


US IPv6 adoption is at 51%, so the answer is just barely yes.


@canvayio I tried to signup, but it kept complaining about me coming from a VPN... eventually I had to enable a VPN to a customer-network to actually be able to signup, instead of originally, without VPN from my home (with v6-tunnel though)

Seems a bit odd...


Sorry about that! Looks like your IP address is somehow listed as a "datacenter ip" which gets detected as a VPN


Which is correct, as I route my IPv6 via wireguard to my DC netblock, because my consumer ISP at home doesn't provide any IPv6.


Granted I was using IPv4, but I've had a lot of trouble using Wireguard to my Linode server for casual browsing. Google became unusable with repeated captchas, several gaming apps blocked my login. I wish web owners wouldn't automatically classify datacenter IPs as malicious. There must be better ways to block spam/bad actors than by the classification of their source IP.


yep agreed, I've disabled the IP detection


Interesting, I just happened to come across IPv6 only "dev" servers this week (https://www.transip.nl/bestel-vps/sandbox-pakket-kiezen/) and now om seeing IPv6-only stuff everywhere. Must be the Baader-Meinhof effect.

It's sad that we still need NAT64 at this point, especially for a server that's only serving IPv6 requests anyway. At least it brags a complex DS-lite setup at the cloud provider, I suppose.


Hetzner Cloud introduced this feature lately too. Public Ipv4 and ipv6 are optional (you can connect the servers to a vnet). Not requiring an ipv4 gives you 0,50€ discount per month.


This looks quite good. There's a very minor typo in the text on the front page, s/comming/coming/.


Thank you, fixed! :)


Hey, I've got a little nitpick too :)

In American English and the Queen's English, "I don't have IPv6, how to access my node?" is bad grammar and should be "I don't have IPv6, how do I access my node?". As a German selling things in Euro, you are clearly using International English and are free to make your own rules - (I do see this sentence structure a lot with non-native speakers). If that is the standard, us Americans will happily mind our own business. Not sure about the Brits.


Thank you! Yes I tried to shorten the sentence but messed it up in the process :)


One thing I would find useful in the situation is a shared IPv4 machine that will do host-based HTTP(S) proxying. This way, I can have an AAAA directly to my IPv6 and an A pointing towards the shared machine for those who can only do IPv4.


A dual stack reverse proxy is already implemented and provides your domains with full IPv4 capabilities.

So even IPv4 only clients can reach your domains


I use fly.io for a similar use case. I have Nginx running in Fly and then use their baked in IPv6 Wireguard to connect backends.


From a quick look it’s not clear if they’re handing out a single ipv6 address or a whole subnet, and if so then what would the prefix length be?


Good catch, I should probably state that on the landing page Each node is assigned a dedicated /64 with larger prefixes to follow soon


Thanks!

I know this might look like a small detail, but ipv6 geeks care about this kind of stuff :)

Since we're talking... Do you also delegate the reverse dns zone for the subnet you provide?


Similar offerings, but based in Switzerland:

https://ipv6onlyhosting.com/


Is there an API? I'm didn't see one on the home page. If not, what makes these servers "cloud"?


Yep, it's just not public yet However still scalable as like, just manually for now


I dont see a transfer or bandwidth limit on the plans. What's the limit?


By default 1TB per node, more is no problem, just pop in a ticket and I’ll increase the limit


for a month or a year?


per month :)


I was looking for this information.


Public v4 addresses are optional with AWS EC2, no?


looks cool, what’s your tech stack?


the backend? Mostly Laravel and FastAPI


<redacted>


Github works just fine, all VMs come preconfigured with a NAT64/ DNS64 nameserver server so you can reach IPv4 only systems as long as you try to resolve them via a domain.


My fault for commenting before reading TFA. Vultr's cheapest VM unfortunately doesn't work so nicely so I'm glad you've handled that.


Happens to the best of us :)


What does it mean by “still overspending on IPv4”?


IPv4 blocks are expensive. If you’re not paying for them directly, then your service provider is paying for them and passing the cost on to you.


On the open market they are currently $45-$55 USD per IP depending on block size.

Source: https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales

So a /16 (like a cloud provider would be buying) is $3.5M USD right now.


Alright, that’s totally understandable. As a service provider grows, it needs to obtain more and more IP blocks. Are there ongoing costs to owning a block of IPv4 addresses, or is it just a one-time purchase fee?


There technically is an ongoing fee to keep your membership (at least with ARIN there is) but it's so small to be meaningless.

Some providers rent their ipv4 blocks rather than purchase them, because the smallest volume you can buy in is 1024 addresses which is pretty expensive, especially for newcomers. In that case there would be an ongoing cost.


You can get /24's (256 addresses), you don't need to get a /22. Anything with a longer prefix is not generally allocated by regional internet registries, and won't usually be accepted over BGP.


Oops, major facepalm, forgot /24 was the actual smallest size. It's too late to edit my comment to fix it sadly.


One-time AFAIK


I think around 7-8 years back, a VPN with ipv4 was $1.5 per month more expensive than one with ipv6 only. It should have been much more now.




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