When this article first appeared on the 4GoodHosting blog in December 2015, the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses for North America had run dry only three months earlier. IPv6 was described, here and almost everywhere else, as "the future of internet addressing."
That framing has aged. IPv6 is no longer a future event that website owners need to wait for. It is the protocol that roughly half of the people reaching Google now arrive on, and it is already carrying traffic to and from a large share of websites whether their owners have noticed or not. Meanwhile, IPv4 has become something it never used to be: a scarce asset with a price attached.
So this rewrite drops the "future" question and answers a more useful one. If you run a website in Canada, what does IPv6 mean for you right now? What should your hosting do, what can quietly break, and what is worth checking this week?
The short answer
If you only read one section, read this one.
- Your visitors are already using IPv6. Many phones on mobile data and many home connections reach websites over IPv6 first, and fall back to IPv4 only when they have to.
- Your website does not need to be IPv6-only, and should not be. The practical standard for a public website is dual-stack: reachable over both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time.
- A half-configured IPv6 setup is worse than none. Publishing an IPv6 address in DNS for a server that does not answer properly on IPv6 can make your site slow or unreachable for some visitors.
- IPv6 is not a ranking factor, but a broken IPv6 path can still cause crawl and availability problems.
- IPv4 addresses now cost real money. That cost shows up in hosting prices, dedicated-IP add-ons and cloud bills, and it is not going back down.
- Firewalls, email and logs are where problems hide. Rules and settings written only for IPv4 are the most common source of IPv6 trouble on otherwise healthy sites.
The rest of this guide explains each of those points and gives you a checklist you can work through with your host.
Why "the future" no longer describes IPv6
IPv6 was standardised in the late 1990s precisely because engineers could see that IPv4's roughly 4.3 billion addresses would not be enough. The protocol's current core specification, RFC 8200, was published as an Internet Standard in 2017. The technology has been finished for a long time. What took decades was deployment.
Three milestones explain where we are now.
The global free pool ran out in 2011. On 3 February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority handed its last five large blocks of IPv4 space to the five regional internet registries. From that day on, no new IPv4 supply existed at the top of the system.
North America's registry ran out in 2015. Canada, the United States and parts of the Caribbean are served by ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. ARIN issued the last addresses in its general IPv4 free pool on 24 September 2015. Since then, organisations in the ARIN region that need more IPv4 space have had to join a waiting list or buy addresses from someone else on the transfer market.
Around half of users now arrive over IPv6. Google measures the share of its users who reach its services over IPv6 and publishes the figure continuously. In April 2026 that measurement crossed 50% for the first time. APNIC, the Asia-Pacific registry, runs its own global measurement using a different weighting method and put worldwide IPv6 capability at about 42% at the same point. The two figures bracket reality: somewhere between four and five in ten users worldwide can reach your site over IPv6 today.
That is not a future. It is a two-protocol internet, and it has been for years. The interesting question for a website owner is how well your site behaves in it.
IPv6 in five minutes: the parts that affect a website
You do not need a networking certification to make good hosting decisions about IPv6. You need to understand a handful of concepts well enough to ask the right questions.
What an IPv6 address looks like
An IPv4 address is 32 bits, written as four decimal numbers from 0 to 255 separated by dots, such as 203.0.113.25. An IPv6 address is 128 bits, written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons.
Written out in full, an address looks like this:
2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0042
Nobody writes them that way in practice. The standard text format, defined in RFC 5952, applies two compression rules. Leading zeros inside each group are dropped, and the single longest run of all-zero groups is replaced with a double colon. The same address becomes:
2001:db8::42
The double colon can only appear once in an address, otherwise it would be ambiguous how many zero groups it stands for. RFC 5952 also asks for lowercase letters, which matters more than it sounds: if one system logs 2001:DB8::42 and another logs 2001:db8::42, a naive comparison will treat them as different addresses.
The examples in this article use the 2001:db8::/32 range, which is reserved for documentation and will never appear on the live internet.
Prefixes, and why a server gets a block rather than an address
The size of the IPv6 address space changes how addresses are handed out. In IPv4, a small website might be assigned one public address, or share one with hundreds of other sites. In IPv6, the normal unit of allocation for a single network segment is a /64, meaning the first 64 bits identify the network and the remaining 64 bits are available for hosts on it.
A single /64 contains as many addresses as the entire IPv4 internet, squared. That sounds like trivia, but it has practical consequences we will come back to. Blocking, rate-limiting or reputation scoring by individual address, which works tolerably in IPv4, is close to meaningless in IPv6, because anyone with a /64 can rotate through addresses endlessly.
What IPv6 does not change
IPv6 replaces the addressing and routing layer. Almost everything a website owner interacts with sits above it and carries on unchanged.
- Domain names stay the same. Visitors still type your .ca or .com
- HTTP and HTTPS stay the same. Pages, redirects, headers and caching work identically over either protocol.
- SSL/TLS certificates stay the same. A certificate is issued for a hostname, not an IP address, so the same certificate serves visitors on both IPv4 and IPv6.
- Your CMS stays the same. WordPress, WooCommerce and most frameworks do not care which protocol delivered the request, apart from the places they store or check visitor IP addresses, covered later.
Myths that older IPv6 articles repeat
A lot of IPv6 content online was written a decade ago and has been paraphrased from site to site since. A few claims in it were never quite right, and some have become wrong over time.
"IPv6 has security built in because IPsec is mandatory." Early IPv6 documents did require IPsec support. That requirement was relaxed years ago; current IPv6 node guidance, RFC 8504, treats IPsec as a SHOULD rather than a MUST. More importantly, support in the operating system never meant traffic was encrypted. Your website's security over IPv6 comes from exactly the same place it does over IPv4: HTTPS, patched software and sensible access controls.
"IPv6 encrypts your traffic like a VPN." It does not. An IPv6 packet is no more private than an IPv4 packet.
"IPv6 is faster." Sometimes a visitor's IPv6 path is shorter or less congested, particularly where their ISP routes IPv4 through large carrier-grade NAT systems. Sometimes it is slower. The protocol itself is not inherently faster; the network path is what matters.
"No NAT means IPv6 is less secure." NAT was never designed as a security control. What protects a server is a firewall policy. With IPv6, that policy has to be written deliberately for IPv6, which is where many real problems start.
How visitors actually reach your site: DNS, AAAA records and Happy Eyeballs
Here is the sequence that runs every time someone visits your site, and it is the key to understanding almost every IPv6 issue a website can have.
When a browser needs to reach www.example.ca, it asks DNS for two kinds of record. An A record returns the site's IPv4 address. An AAAA record (pronounced "quad-A") returns its IPv6 address. If your DNS zone has only an A record, the site is IPv4-only, and every visitor uses IPv4 regardless of their own connection.
If both records exist and the visitor's device has working IPv6, the device will normally prefer IPv6. Operating systems follow a default address-selection policy, set out in RFC 6724, that ranks IPv6 ahead of IPv4 in most situations.
Preferring IPv6 blindly would be fragile, so modern browsers and operating systems use a technique called Happy Eyeballs, specified in its current form in RFC 8305. In simplified terms, the client starts an IPv6 connection attempt first, and if it has not succeeded within a short delay (the recommended default is 250 milliseconds), it starts an IPv4 attempt in parallel. Whichever connects first wins.
Happy Eyeballs is the reason the two-protocol internet mostly works without anyone noticing. It is also the reason IPv6 problems on a website are often invisible to its owner.
The broken-AAAA problem
Consider what happens when a site publishes an AAAA record, but the server at that address is not properly listening on IPv6, or a firewall silently drops IPv6 traffic.
A visitor on a modern browser with working IPv6 tries IPv6 first, waits, gives up and falls back to IPv4. The page loads, but a fraction of a second later than it should, on every new connection. The owner, testing from an office connection that happens to be IPv4-only, sees nothing wrong.
Older clients, some embedded devices, command-line tools, monitoring systems, payment callbacks and other automated agents may not implement Happy Eyeballs at all. For them, a broken IPv6 path can mean a long timeout or an outright failure.
The practical rule follows directly: publish an AAAA record only for a service that is fully working on IPv6, and test it from an IPv6 connection. An accurate IPv4-only site is better than a dual-stack site with a broken IPv6 half.
Dual-stack hosting, explained
Dual-stack simply means a server, and the network in front of it, run IPv4 and IPv6 side by side. The web server accepts connections on both, DNS publishes both an A and an AAAA record, and visitors use whichever their connection supports best.
For a public website in 2026, dual-stack is the sensible target. IPv6-only hosting would cut off the substantial share of visitors whose networks still have no IPv6. IPv4-only hosting still works for everyone today, because IPv6-only visitors are rare on the public web and their providers usually offer translation to reach IPv4 sites, but it leaves you exposed to rising IPv4 costs and to translation layers you do not control.
On the server itself, enabling IPv6 is usually a small configuration change. A web server has to be told to listen on IPv6 addresses as well as IPv4 ones. In nginx, for example, that is an extra listen directive:
server {
listen 443 ssl;
listen [::]:443 ssl;
server_name www.example.ca;
# certificate and site configuration unchanged
}
Apache and LiteSpeed have equivalent settings. The certificate and the rest of the site configuration do not change. The harder work is everything around the web server: the firewall, the mail system, monitoring and any application code that handles IP addresses.
Who controls what on each type of hosting
How much of this you manage yourself depends on the kind of hosting you use. The table below is a general guide; the exact split varies by provider and plan.
| Hosting type | Who assigns the IPv6 address | Who configures the web server | Who manages the firewall | What you should check |
| Shared hosting | The host | The host | The host | Whether an AAAA record is published, and whether it works |
| Managed WordPress | The host | The host | The host, plus any security plugin you add | Plugins that log, block or rate-limit by IP |
| VPS | The host assigns a block; you configure it | You | You | Web server, firewall, fail2ban-style tools and mail on both protocols |
| Dedicated server | The host assigns a block; you configure it | You | You | Everything on the VPS line, plus reverse DNS for your block |
On shared and managed plans, the question to ask your host is simple: is IPv6 enabled for my account, and if so, is my domain's AAAA record published and tested? On a VPS or a dedicated server, you own the configuration, and the checklist later in this article applies to you directly.
Why IPv4 addresses now cost money
For most of the internet's history, an IP address was treated as a free by-product of having a hosting account. That changed once the registries ran out.
With no new supply, every additional IPv4 address has to come from someone who already holds one. Addresses are transferred between organisations, usually for payment, under registry transfer policies. Prices on that market have risen substantially over the last decade, and the cost flows through to anyone who rents infrastructure.
The clearest public signal came from one of the largest public cloud platforms. From 1 February 2024, it began charging US$0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address on its platform, whether in use or idle. That works out to roughly US$43.80 a year for an always-on address. In announcing the change, the provider said the cost of acquiring a single public IPv4 address had risen by more than 300% over the previous five years, and said openly that it wanted customers to be more frugal with IPv4 and to move towards IPv6.
A few dollars a month is trivial for one website. It is not trivial for an agency running dozens of client environments, or a startup whose architecture gives every container or test server its own public address.
What this means when you compare plans
IPv4 scarcity shows up in hosting decisions in a few concrete ways.
Dedicated IPv4 add-ons are worth questioning. For years, small sites bought a dedicated IP address because older SSL setups required one. That requirement disappeared once browsers universally supported Server Name Indication (SNI), which lets many HTTPS sites share one address. Unless you have a specific technical reason, such as certain email reputation strategies, legacy software or a payment integration that allowlists your address, a dedicated IPv4 address is often an unnecessary expense. Our SSL certificates page covers the certificate side of that decision.
Server plans with more addresses cost more to provide. If you need several public IPv4 addresses on a VPS or dedicated server, expect them to be priced as the scarce resource they are, while IPv6 space typically comes as a generous block.
IPv6 is the cost-control lever. The more of your internal and back-end traffic runs over IPv6, the fewer public IPv4 addresses you need. For larger deployments, this is now as much a budgeting question as a technical one.
How to check your own site in ten minutes
You can find out where your site stands with a few free tests. None of them change anything.
- Does your domain publish an AAAA record? On macOS or Linux, open a terminal and run the commands below, replacing the domain with your own. On Windows, nslookup -type=AAAA www.example.ca does the same job.
dig A www.example.ca +short
dig AAAA www.example.ca +short
If the second command returns nothing, your site is IPv4-only. That is not an emergency, but it is worth a conversation with your host. If it returns an address, move to step two.
- Does the site actually answer on that address? From a machine with IPv6 connectivity, force an IPv6 request:
curl -6 -I https://www.example.ca/
A normal response, such as HTTP/2 200 or a 301 redirect, means IPv6 is working. A timeout or connection error means you have the broken-AAAA problem described above, and it should be fixed or the AAAA record removed until it is.
- Test from a real IPv6 connection. Many mobile networks give phones IPv6 connectivity. Turn off Wi-Fi, load your site on mobile data and compare. Free browser-based IPv6 test services will also tell you whether your current connection has IPv6 and whether a given site is reachable over it.
- Check both your apex domain and www. It is common for www.example.ca and example.ca to have different records. Test each hostname that serves traffic, including any subdomains for shops, booking systems or client portals.
- Check your mail server separately. If your domain sends email from your own server, look up the reverse DNS of its IPv6 address:
dig -x 2001:db8::25 +short
If the server has an IPv6 address but no reverse DNS entry, you may have an email problem. The next section explains why.
Where IPv6 quietly breaks things
Most IPv6 problems on real websites are not caused by IPv6 itself. They are caused by systems that were configured for IPv4 and never updated. These are the places to look.
Firewalls and allowlists written only for IPv4
On Linux servers, IPv4 and IPv6 firewall rules have historically been managed separately. A server can have a carefully tuned IPv4 policy and a wide-open, or completely closed, IPv6 one. Both are problems. A wide-open IPv6 firewall exposes services you thought were protected. A completely closed one produces the broken-AAAA behaviour, where visitors wait for IPv6 to fail before falling back.
There is a second trap specific to IPv6. In IPv4, many administrators block ICMP, the protocol behind "ping", as a reflex. Doing the same with ICMPv6 breaks IPv6 in subtle ways. IPv6 routers never fragment packets in transit, so hosts rely on ICMPv6 "packet too big" messages to discover how large a packet can be on a given path. Block those messages and some connections will stall once they start sending larger responses, which often means pages that begin loading and then hang. Guidance from the IETF, RFC 4890, describes which ICMPv6 messages must be allowed through.
The same applies to any allowlist. If an admin panel, database or SSH port is restricted to your office IP address, check what happens when your office connection gains IPv6. You may lock yourself out, or discover that the IPv6 path was never restricted at all.
Rate limiting, blocklists and brute-force protection
Security tools that block abusive visitors by IP address need rethinking for IPv6. Because a single customer or attacker may control an entire /64, blocking one IPv6 address at a time achieves very little. Good IPv6-aware tools block or rate-limit by prefix, usually /64, rather than by individual address. If you run your own server, check how your brute-force protection handles IPv6. If you use managed hosting, ask your host how its protections treat it. Our article on how the website has become the security perimeter covers the wider context.
Email: reverse DNS and SPF
Email is the area where IPv6 most often causes visible damage, because major mailbox providers are stricter with IPv6 senders than with IPv4 ones.
Google's published sender guidelines, for example, state that mail sent to Gmail over IPv6 must come from an address with a valid reverse DNS (PTR) record, and that the hostname in that record must resolve forward to the same address. Messages that fail those checks may be marked as spam or rejected outright. The sending domain also needs to pass SPF or DKIM authentication.
This catches servers out in a specific way. A mail server that gains an IPv6 address will often start sending over IPv6 automatically, because the receiving server publishes one. If nobody has set up reverse DNS for the new address, or added it to the domain's SPF record with an ip6: mechanism, deliverability drops overnight with no change anyone remembers making.
If you send from your own VPS or dedicated server, the fix is either to configure IPv6 properly for mail, with reverse DNS set by your host for your address block, SPF updated and DKIM in place, or to tell your mail software to send over IPv4 only until you have. If you are building a mailing list, our guide to list building for email marketing explains why deliverability deserves this care.
Logs, analytics and geolocation
Once IPv6 traffic arrives, your server logs, analytics and security tools will record IPv6 addresses. Check that they can. Log-parsing scripts that assume four dotted numbers, reports that group visitors by address and geolocation databases with weaker IPv6 coverage can all produce odd results. Visitors may appear to come from the wrong region, or the same person may look like several visitors as their device rotates temporary addresses.
Applications that store IP addresses
Anywhere your application saves a visitor's IP address, the storage has to be large enough for IPv6. A database column sized for the longest IPv4 address, 15 characters, will truncate IPv6 addresses, which can be up to 39 characters in standard form and longer in some mapped formats. This affects comment systems, login-attempt trackers, order fraud checks, consent logs and custom plugins. It is worth checking any home-grown code and any plugin that records or compares IP addresses.
A related trap sits behind proxies and content delivery networks. If your site sits behind a reverse proxy or CDN, the address your application sees may belong to the proxy, and the real visitor address arrives in a header. Make sure whatever reads that header understands IPv6. Our explainer on how proxy servers work covers the mechanics.
IPv6, SEO and crawling: what is real and what is not
Search questions about IPv6 tend to go one of two ways: either "does IPv6 boost my rankings?" or "will IPv6 hurt my SEO?" The honest answers are no, and only if it is broken.
There is no IPv6 ranking bonus. Google has never described IPv6 support as a ranking signal. Adding an AAAA record will not move a page up the results.
Search engines crawl over both protocols. Google publishes the address ranges its crawlers use, and that list includes IPv6 prefixes as well as IPv4 ones. If your site is dual-stack, some crawling may arrive over IPv6.
A broken IPv6 setup can therefore cause crawl problems. If a crawler reaches your server over IPv6 and gets timeouts, errors or a firewall block, that shows up the same way any other availability problem does: as fetch failures, slower crawling and, in bad cases, pages dropping from the index. Sites that allowlist crawler addresses at the firewall need to include the IPv6 ranges, and anyone verifying that a visitor claiming to be Googlebot is genuine should use the reverse-then-forward DNS check that Google documents, which works for both protocols.
Speed effects are indirect. If IPv6 is broken and browsers are waiting for fallback, every new connection is slower. That delay feeds into real-user performance data, which does matter for page experience. Fixing a broken AAAA record is a small but genuine performance fix.
The underlying principle is the same one that runs through our guide to how your server affects Google rankings: search engines reward sites that are consistently reachable and fast for real users. IPv6 is one more path that has to be reliable.
The Canadian angle: privacy, logs and where addresses live
Most IPv6 content online is written from an American, European or Asian perspective. A few points apply specifically to site owners in Canada.
Canada sits in the ARIN region. Canadian networks and hosting providers obtain IP address space from ARIN, the same registry that exhausted its IPv4 free pool in 2015. Canadian businesses face the same scarcity and transfer-market costs as their US neighbours.
Adoption varies by provider, not just by country. A country-level IPv6 percentage hides a lot of variation. Whether a particular visitor arrives on IPv6 depends heavily on their internet service provider and whether they are on mobile or fixed broadband. Google's statistics page publishes a live per-country figure, and it is worth checking Canada's current number rather than relying on any figure quoted in an article, including this one.
IP addresses are treated as privacy-sensitive in Canada. In R. v. Bykovets, 2024 SCC 6, a five to four majority of the Supreme Court of Canada held that Canadians have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP addresses, so a police request for an IP address is a search under section 8 of the Charter. That case concerns police access rather than how a private business must handle data, and Canada's private-sector privacy statutes carry their own tests. For a website owner, though, the practical signal is clear: treat logs of visitor IP addresses as personal information, collect only what you need, limit who can see it and decide how long to keep it.
IPv6 can make addresses more identifying. Some older IPv6 configurations built part of a device's address from its network hardware identifier, which produced an address that stayed the same wherever the device went. Modern operating systems use privacy extensions, now specified in RFC 8981, that generate temporary, rotating addresses for outgoing connections. Your server logs will still contain far more distinct addresses than they did under IPv4, and some will be more stable than others. Truncating stored addresses, for example keeping only the /64 prefix for analytics, is a common way to reduce that exposure. If your privacy obligations are complex, for example in health or financial services, confirm your approach with counsel.
Logs follow your servers. When your website uses hosting in Canada, such as 4GoodHosting's Vancouver and Toronto facilities, your access logs, including every IPv6 address they record, are normally stored in Canada too. For businesses that care about data residency, that is a small but real part of the picture. Our overview of why storing data in Canada matters covers the broader considerations, and our Canadian data centres page describes both locations.
Three scenarios: what IPv6 means in practice
Abstract advice only goes so far. Here is how the same issues look for three common types of Canadian website owner.
A retail shop on shared hosting
A Halifax gift shop runs a small WooCommerce store on a shared plan. The owner does not manage a server and does not want to.
For this business, IPv6 is almost entirely the host's job. The owner's to-do list is short: confirm with the host whether the domain publishes an AAAA record, run the curl -6 test or ask the host to, and check that any security plugin handles IPv6 addresses sensibly. If the store pays for a dedicated IPv4 address purely for SSL, it is worth asking whether that is still needed. The saving is small, but so is the effort.
An agency running client sites on a VPS
A Calgary web agency hosts 30 client WordPress sites on two virtual private servers it manages itself. It enabled IPv6 on both servers last year and published AAAA records for every client domain.
This is where IPv6 needs real attention. The agency should confirm the firewall policy is equivalent on both protocols, that its brute-force protection blocks by prefix rather than by address, and that uptime monitoring checks each site over IPv4 and IPv6 separately. If one server sends email for contact forms, it needs reverse DNS on its IPv6 address and updated SPF records, or it needs to send over IPv4 only. A single missed step here produces a support queue full of "our contact form emails stopped arriving" tickets. Our guide to Canadian VPS hosting covers the wider responsibilities of running your own server.
A SaaS startup planning for growth
A Montreal software startup runs its product on a handful of dedicated servers and expects to add many more back-end machines over the next two years.
For this team, IPv6 is a cost and architecture decision as much as a compatibility one. Running internal traffic between application servers, databases and workers over IPv6 means those machines never need scarce public IPv4 addresses. Public IPv4 can then be reserved for the edge: load balancers and anything that must be reachable by IPv4-only customers. Designing that way from the start is far cheaper than retrofitting it later, and it keeps the startup's address costs flat as the server count grows.
An IPv6 readiness checklist for your website
Work through this list with your host or your developer. On shared and managed hosting, most items are questions to ask. On a VPS or dedicated server, most are tasks to complete.
- Inventory your hostnames. List every domain and subdomain that serves traffic, sends email or receives callbacks.
- Check DNS for each. Note which have A records only, which have AAAA records, and which should.
- Test every AAAA record from an IPv6 connection. Remove or fix any that do not answer correctly.
- Confirm the web server listens on IPv6 for every site that publishes an AAAA record.
- Compare firewall rules on both protocols. Make sure IPv6 is neither wide open nor silently closed, and that essential ICMPv6 messages are allowed.
- Update allowlists. Include IPv6 addresses for admin access, and IPv6 crawler ranges if you allowlist search engines.
- Review brute-force and rate-limiting tools so they operate on IPv6 prefixes rather than single addresses.
- Fix email before it breaks. Set reverse DNS for any IPv6 address that sends mail, add it to SPF with ip6:, confirm DKIM, or restrict outbound mail to IPv4.
- Check application storage. Make sure databases, plugins and logs store full IPv6 addresses without truncation.
- Monitor both paths. Configure uptime checks that test IPv4 and IPv6 separately, so an IPv6-only failure is not hidden by Happy Eyeballs.
- Review logging and retention. Decide how long you keep visitor addresses, and whether you need full addresses or only prefixes.
- Question paid IPv4 extras. Confirm whether each dedicated IPv4 address you pay for is still needed.
What comes next
There will be no single day when IPv4 is switched off. The more likely path is gradual and already visible. Mobile networks and newer providers increasingly run IPv6 as their main protocol and carry IPv4 as a translated or tunnelled service on top. Large content platforms serve both. IPv4 persists at the edges, increasingly priced as the premium, legacy resource it has become.
For website owners, that trajectory points to a clear stance. Run dual-stack, make both paths equally reliable, keep IPv4 use deliberate rather than accidental, and treat IPv6 as a normal part of your hosting rather than a special project. The sites that run into trouble are rarely the ones that ignored IPv6 entirely. They are the ones that half-enabled it and never tested it.
FAQ
Do I need to do anything about IPv6 if my site works fine today?
Possibly not. Your site is reachable by everyone over IPv4, even if it has no IPv6. The two things worth checking are whether your domain publishes an AAAA record that does not actually work, which can slow the site down for some visitors, and whether your email is being sent over IPv6 without the right DNS records. If both are fine, enabling proper dual-stack hosting is a sensible improvement rather than an emergency.
Will switching on IPv6 improve my Google rankings?
No. IPv6 support is not a ranking factor. It can help indirectly only by removing problems, such as slow fallbacks or crawl failures, caused by a broken IPv6 configuration.
What is an AAAA record?
An AAAA record is a DNS record that maps a hostname to an IPv6 address, in the same way an A record maps a hostname to an IPv4 address. A site that is reachable over both protocols publishes both records.
Is IPv6 more secure than IPv4?
Not inherently. Both protocols can be run securely or insecurely. The main security risk with IPv6 on a website is a firewall policy that was written for IPv4 and never extended to IPv6.
Can my site be IPv6-only?
Technically yes, but for a public website it is not advisable in 2026. A large share of visitors still have no IPv6 connectivity, and although many networks offer translation services, relying on them is a poor trade. Dual-stack is the standard for public sites.
Does my SSL certificate need to change for IPv6?
No. Certificates are issued for hostnames, not IP addresses. The same certificate works for visitors arriving over IPv4 or IPv6.
Why are my emails going to spam after my server got an IPv6 address?
The most common cause is that the server began sending mail over IPv6 without a reverse DNS record for its new address, or without that address being included in the domain's SPF record. Major mailbox providers apply stricter checks to mail arriving over IPv6. Set up reverse DNS and SPF for the IPv6 address, or configure the mail server to send over IPv4 only until you have.
Key takeaways
- IPv6 is no longer a future technology. Roughly half of users reaching Google now do so over IPv6, and North America's IPv4 free pool ran out in 2015.
- Dual-stack hosting, running IPv4 and IPv6 together, is the practical standard for public websites.
- A broken AAAA record is worse than no AAAA record. Test from a real IPv6 connection before publishing one.
- IPv4 addresses have become a priced, scarce resource, and that cost now shows up in hosting and cloud bills.
- Firewalls, brute-force protection, email authentication, logs and IP-storing applications are where IPv6 problems usually hide.
- IPv6 is not a ranking factor, but IPv6 failures can cause crawl and performance problems.
- In Canada, treat stored IP addresses as privacy-sensitive, keep only what you need, and know where your logs are stored.
Conclusion
The internet did not switch from IPv4 to IPv6. It grew a second protocol alongside the first, and it has been running on both for years. For a website owner, the question is no longer whether IPv6 is coming. It is whether your site behaves well on the protocol that around half of your visitors may already be using.
For most sites, getting that right is not a large project. It is a short checklist: confirm your DNS is accurate, test both paths, extend your firewall and email configuration to IPv6, and monitor both. The businesses that do those things rarely think about IPv6 again. The ones that skip them tend to find out the hard way, through slow pages, missing emails or a crawl report nobody can explain.
Talk to us about IPv6 on your hosting
If you host with 4GoodHosting and want to know how IPv6 applies to your account, our support team can check whether IPv6 is enabled on your plan, whether your domain's DNS records are set up correctly, and what would need to change on a VPS or dedicated server. If you are comparing Web Hosting in Canada and want a provider that will talk through the network side as well as the plan features, contact the 4GoodHosting team or explore our Canadian web hosting plans.
