Mouse in the House

As World IPv6 day dawned in Australia on June 8, we posted a blog reporting that a dismal 2.6% of the world’s top 500 websites supported IPv6 on their main “www” host (a.k.a. dual stack). As the sun rose across the rest of the world we continued measuring and found an astonishing difference.

85 dual stacked websites

Several hours ago, we reported that of the top 500 websites only 13 were dual stacked (in tech talk, they have an AAAA DNS record next to the usual A record). As World IPV6 day continued to dawn across the rest of the world and additional 72 website started to show signs of life over IPv6; taking the total to 85. Although it was a dramatic increase over a single day the figures means that only 17% of the top 500 websites are IPv6 ready.

At 4:00 UTC today, the following hosts resolve to an IPv6 address next to the typical IPv4 address.

These hosts are:

With an additional 72 websites added in the last day, many hosts have clearly waited until World IPv6 Day to enable their websites to be reached over IPv6.

Some stats over time

The below chart shows that on World IPv6 day, only 17% of top 500 websites supports IPv6 on their main “www” host (a.k.a. dual stack), while 11% supports IPv6 on a dedicated host.

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 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 influence on the performance of websites, so we monitored all hosts with our IPv6 monitoring solution from September 2010 until the end of April 2011.

The results are stated below:

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!