Recently Cloudflare made a pretty cool move, and made their IPv6 services available to all of their customers – even the free ones, like me! So first things first, huge kudos to Cloudflare for offering this up; it has offered IPv6 to many users whose hosting companies do not offer it, and it’s so pain-free it’s unbelievable.

Cloud Flare – My Heroes!

I’ve wanted my blog to be IPv6 enabled for a while, but sadly my hosting company (the lovely folks at Namecheap) for some unknown reason have not pulled their fingers out and got it sorted out yet, even though their customers have been asking for it for at least a few years now. Griping aside, I moved to Cloudflare earlier this year for my main site so I could provide faster response for you lovely reading people, and to reduce the load on my hosting server. After some initial problems of my own creation, things are stable now and I am thoroughly appreciating this being offered as a free service.

By allowing IPv6 to be enabled for all of their customers, not just the paying ones, and – equally importantly – enabling it by default for all new customers and sites, Cloudflare has brought a pretty big new chunk of the Internet to IPv6, which is definitely a good thing in terms of answering my annual question of “Great, I have IPv6 – so what’s actually out there for me to see with it?”

The answer now is … LameJournal! Like a boss, in fact:

These stats are courtesy of the always-interesting IPvFoo plugin for Chrome, itself a copy (derivative?) of the Firefox Add-on “IPvFox”, which I highly recommend if you want to see what’s really happening. It’s always a little disappointing, by the way, to see some of the more common services like GoogleAds, Doubleclick and (in part) WordPress not offering their services over IPv6.

Still, some IPv6 brings us closer to adoption than no IPv6, so I’ll take it. Cheers, Cloudflare – I appreciate your free service!

30 Blogs in 30 Days

This post is part of my participation in Etherealmind’s 30 Blogs in 30 Days challenge.