Sounds like an interesting solution for back end servers and compute clusters. Your front end or control server has IPv4 to talk to the world, but all your database and back end compute servers that only talk to the front end server can be IPv6 servers to save money.
If you use Cloudflare (and maybe other CDNs though I don't know any) they can proxy you an ipv4 address to your ipv6 only backend, so you don't really need your own ipv4.
But notice that private networking is more complex. If you want to reach non-public server, either you have to log in into a public server in the same network and then open another connection, or you need VRF routing (ouch!).
Yeah, this unfettered inter-networking sounds like a really bad idea. If only there was a way to control access besides fragmented addressing islands...
It's also worth noting that a lot of the pay4botnet sites masquerading as stress testing services can't/won't do ipv6, which offers slightly more availability with ipv6 linked or dual-stack services - at least for now.
Unrelated to the ipv6 subject, but does anyone else just find the whole concept of "credits" that gandi is using absolutely irritating?
I know that it lists "or about $xx.xx per month" next to the credit cost, but why in the hell even have the credits in the first place? It's easier to just use the actual costs in the customer's local currency than have them try and figure out what exactly a credit/"coin" is worth.
Good lord yes. They introduced it as a much easier way to calculate billing but it's actively turned me off renting a server there. Just tell me how much per hour and per month. Even if it's broken down by resource, it works for Rackspace - that's all I need.
Considering their motto is "No bullshit" you'd have thought they'd just give you the prices and leave you to it
* Being "cloud-ish" and have a pay-as-you-go system
* Computing a price to use a 256MB of RAM for 3 hours in real currency was too complicated (like, for example : 0.0000174€)
* Having no surprise at the end of the month, as some hosting providers compute the global use and bill the consumption at the end of the month (you may have surprise)
* Using credits, to create a new server, adding a new network interface, etc, you do not need to buy 'resources' like it was before
* There are two interfaces : historic usage of credits by resources, display the credits consumption as what you use in real currency
* No multiple expiration date by product/resource
* ...
The latter two do keep track of fractional charges. They deduct $0.01 from prepaid credits once that much is owed. Since you accept multiple currencies, this becomes a bit more complex but still doable. For example, let the user choose the currency to display, or pick a single standard currency (euros?) and use it as your units.
Tarsnap and NFSn choose to refund your prepaid credits if and only if you close your account with them. Not every prepaid system lets you get your prepayments back at all. I am fine with this: I am willing to pay a bit more (prepayment without refund) in order to limit my liability to the amount I intend to pay.
According to [1] French law means they can't store credit card information or directly debit bank accounts. So I can see why a prepay account would appeal to them.
No, he meant that it makes it automated to add money to the prepaid from the CB when some conditions are reached.
It is indeed just a simple process to register the card at the bank and configure the minimum amount before adding money.
Prepaid doesn't mean you have to deal with credits, though. My phone is prepaid, but the carrier still lists the price in real currency, not fake money.
advantage of credits vs local money is that the cost of credits is lower as you buy it by larger batch.
It's a way to reward bigger buyers which would be confusing when using local money ("get credited of €215 when paying €180" ? what about refund ? invoicing unit ?)
And as resources can be micromanaged (per hour, via their api), you'd end up with tiny fractions of local currencies and rounding issues while all credit operations are done on integer afaik.
Yes, it is the only reason I don't use them for hosting, even though I've had my domains with them for over a decade. For a company with a motto of "no bullshit", it is really disappointing. Sketchy credit nonsense is about as bullshit as you can get.
Back around the early 2000's we were running something of an ad-hoc VPN of dynamically connected servers. It was somewhat similar to the way Napster worked with one central server and many connected nodes. These connections relied on manual configuration, for the most part, and that did involve a fair amount of tunneling.
We designed Brightbox Cloud with the scarcity of public IPv4 addresses in mind since day one. Running out of addresses shouldn't be a surprise to anyone! http://brightbox.com/blog/2012/01/11/ipv6-servers/
I was going to post a link to Redstation, a UK hosting provider, whom offered a discount of £5/month (approx 10% for their cheapest server) if you took IPv6 only. However, it seems that option has now been pulled sadly!
This was a while ago, but Gandi disabled my account - with no warnings - for running a Tor node on one of my VPSes. I then had to send a copy of my passport to eventually get it reenabled. The frustrating thing was that they were also my domain registrar, so during that time I lost all access to my domains as well.
I transferred my domains away after that and decided it wasn't wise to mix services together due to this risk. So now I have domains with Tucows, DNS with Hurricane Electric and VPS with a provider that only does VPS. And I don't bother running Tor nodes any more.
Domains registered with Gandi must be used in accordance with the rights of third parties (copyrights, intellectual property rights, personality rights, etc.), and current applicable laws and regulations.
For example, Gandi does not tolerate activity that is morally objectionable or that poses a threat to public order, that spreads Computer Contaminants (Viruses, Trojans, etc.), and/or that engages in fraudulent activity such as Identity Theft.
Some of these things are fairly broad and vague. There's the whole grey area of speech that may or may not violate the rights of a third party. Then you have the whole "public order" thing. Plus, you're potentially dealing with French legal standards, which may be very different than the US standards that I'm used to.
Thanks! This is actually very important as I do use them for my 'important' domains as well. Even though I can't foresee any problem like this, it's something to keep an eye on.
I've used Gandi for the last 3 years and DigitalOcean for about six months. I like both of them but for mostly non-overlapping reasons.
DigitalOcean has excellent documentation and very fast responses to my support queries. Their prices are lower. I'll keep using them and recommending them to others.
Gandi gives me very good performance as well as a few extras that keep me interested. They also offer a broader range of services (like domain registration) and have an excellent track record of supporting good causes. I'll keep using them and can recommend them as well.
If I (maybe unfairly) divide user skill levels up into thirds, I'd recommend DigitalOcean to an average user, and Gandi to those with above & below average needs. Basically, Gandi has simpler products for those new to hosting and also rolls out new things like IPV6 and DNSSEC faster if you really want to test them. These aren't always supported (you break it, you may be on your own) but are available early compared to other hosts.
Rather than look at this as a zero sum proposition, take a look at Gandi's 'supports'[1] page, realise that they continue to thrive despite no advertising, and think about whether you want in on that deal.
not yet on their VPS offer (but that is my platform for all of my future projects). On every other gandi products I used, I've been amazed by the technical aspect and their support.
> This means that an LIR can only receive a one-time /22 allocation (1,024 IPv4 addresses) if it can justify the need and already has an IPv6 allocation
Does anyone know if gandi uses ECC in their servers? This is possibly my biggest problem with the VPS fad, nobody will give you a straight answer about whether or not you can actually rely on them to not silently corrupt data.
As a general principle, just treat no answer as no. Companies that use ECC advertise it. You can also look in /proc/cpuinfo to see if it's a Xeon/Opteron or not.
> nobody cares about IPv6 except for us tech nerds
Nobody cares that your app is written in Rails of NodeJS. People care that it works and does what matters to them. IPv4 is doomed to not work at some point so we "tech nerds" have to care and do something about it.
> IPv6 is used by nobody
From the top of my mind, many of the french ISPs have IPv6 ready on the customer side, a radio button click away, while some are even on by default. I can readily assume that today, every worthwhile machine connected to a LAN supports at least IPv6 local scope. Also, every single Mac out there uses an IPv6 VPN (over IPwhatever) when (at least) Back to my Mac is active (ifconfig utun0).
> in five years it will still be nowhere
Unless you settle for impractical definitions of "nowhere" as "not ubiquitous", it is definitely there already. IPv6 does solve real problems today, locally and globally.
> From the top of my mind, many of the french ISPs have IPv6 ready on the customer side, a radio button click away, while some are even on by default.
I think this is one of the key points that certain people end up missing.
Windows Vista and later can do IPv6 by default, recent versions of OS X will do it by default as well. All an ISP needs to do is send a user a router which can handle IPv6 traffic - and suddenly the entire network will start doing IPv6 traffic with places like Google who are IPv6 ready.
It will just happen! Add the IPv6 ready equipment and the traffic will flow. The only problem is certain ISPs who are still stuck with their heads in sand, not providing IPv6 connectivity, and still providing customers equipment which can't deal with IPv6 traffic - some of which might not be possible to upgrade.
I actually expect it to accelerate. Once it has significant takeup you start to look bad if you don't support it, which will add to the drivers for ISPs to implement it.
I know of several German ISPs (Kabel Deutschland, MNet) that don't even give you a dynamic IPv4 IP anymore, but use Dual-Stack Lite (that is, IPv6, and carrier-grade NAT to access public IPv4 addresses). Oh, and they limit the ports (and thus connections) you can have open at a time, to something like 1000. I wouldn't want to have such a connection.
If you intend to host your service behind something like CloudFlair it doesn't matter that some users don't have IPv6 yet: they'll contact the cache service via IPv4 and it'll contact your servers as needed via IPv6. The end user doesn't have to care, or even know at all, and you have just made a saving by not having to pay for IPv4 addresses.
People will start to care when IPv6 takeup hits critical mass and we start seeing services optimised for it. When people start seeing services they want to use not working as well through layers of NAT, they start asking their ISPs why they are having a problem and their friends on other ISPs aren't. Maybe at some point services will start charging a premium for IPv4 access (so IPv6 users aren't subsidising those who haven't moved forward yet) like on retail business did for IE6/7 users (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18440979) then people will care. That seems extreme though and might alienate users, less severe option would be to serve more adverts.
There are some places where things are already heading towards being IPv6 only. A friend of mine noticed this when out east for a work related trip, the hotel he was in provided Internet access but IPv6 only internally. They provided a 6-to-4 gateway so IPv4 only sites worked fine (with everyone from several places looking to be coming from the same address) but your device had to speak IPv6 to connect to the network in the first place (which his phone didn't).
I'm just waiting for when we get to the point where there are thousands of users behind the same ipv4 address and one of them gets the ip banned from something popular. I'm sure customers would start caring then.
Or worse, someone does something incredibly wrong from that address (arranges a bombing, posts kiddy porn, or so forth) and the police arrest everybody associated with the address just-in-case...
In same way, no one except 'us tech nerds' care about IPv4. Why would anyone who does not have to work with it, or have an interest in tech, care about protocols?
(For what it's worth, I should disclose the fact that I work for Gandi, as requested by a colleague wrt our policy. Thanks Amy, I believe the point is still valid as-is and we followed the no bullshit stuff ;)
I have an IPv6 ISP in Canada (Teksavvy), and quite happy with it (except for the lack of reverse-DNS). I'm too cheap to pay for a static IPv4 netblock at home, but IPv6 works fine to manage the ton of publicly-accessible VMs and other services (wifi mesh network) I run from home.
When I'm working from outside home, I use a tinc VPN to access my IPv6 services, and also redirect my IPv6 traffic through my home network.
Other fun experiment: if you are ipv6-enabled, look at the percentage of bittorrent peers who are in ipv6 vs ipv4. IPv6 is growing.
