Mouse in the House

We like measuring stuff, so we did an inquiry into the top 500 trafficked global Internet websites to see which ones have adopted the new IPv6 protocol. We have continuously tracked these 500 host names from September 2010 leading up to today’s World IPv6 day. Surprising, when we started tracking, only one had IPv6 on their “www” host name: www.free.fr, a French broadband access provider.

From one to 13 dual stack websites

Since September, we have found that 13 hosts have started to show signs of life on IPv6. Today the following hosts resolve to an IPv6 address next to the typical IPv4 address (in tech talk, they now have an AAAA DNS record next to the usual A record).

These hosts are:

• www.free.fr
• www.bit.ly
• www.facebook.com
• www.fbcdn.net
• www.naver.com
• www.engadget.com
• www.aol.com
• www.mapquest.com
• www.hostgator.com
• www.zynga.com
• www.wordreference.com
• www.mozilla.com
• www.t-online.de

Note that some of these websites have reverted to IPv4 since we first saw IPv6 connectivity.

Dedicated IPv6 websites growing as well

Next to the “www” host names we also searched for hosts especially set up for IPv6 by looking for all sorts of varieties on the main domain e.g.

• www6.domain.com
• ipv6.domain.com
• www.ipv6.domain.com
• www.v6.domain.com

Using this search method we found many more results; as of today, our trackers detected 64 hosts with an IPv6 address. The growth in the number of dedicated IPv6 test websites is shown below:

It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that about half of all hosts that can be reached over IPv6 were added in May, a month before today’s World IPv6 Day.

Some stats

Of the top 500 sites only 2.6% supports IPv6 on their main “www” host (a.k.a. dual stack), while 9.8% supports it on a dedicated host, just for IPv6.

It’s worth noting that quite a number of the investigated hosts either have a dead website, or one that is down (unavailable) more than it is up. We excluded such websites from the results below.

Conclusion:

IPv6 has undoubtedly gaining some traction with today’s World IPv6 Day but the penetration remains disappointing as very few are fully functional websites.

Monitoring is our bizz, also over IPv6

We were curious to find out if IPv6 has an influence on the performance of websites, so we monitored all hosts with our IPv6 monitoring solution and are intrigued to find the following:

We can make two observations:

• Resolving IP addresses for IPv6 seems to go slightly faster
• Websites on IPv4 load faster than their IPv6 counterpart

We don’t wish to draw any immediate conclusions from these preliminary findings as many factors can play a role; possibly the most important factor being that IPv6 websites are different from the IPv4 websites and more experimental in nature (e.g not up to scale etc.).

The complete list

Below you can see all hosts that support some form of IPv6 access:

We have more stats available; if you are interested please leave a comment below!