Ask HN: Can you 'succeed' going IPv6 only?

6 points by techdragon ↗ HN
Can a technical product or service startup make money on a IPv6 Only stack?

Would you accept that your paying extra (like $1 to $5 extra) to use IPv4 if there was split pricing where IPv4 support was in a premium deal, or IPv6 was the only option on an introductory tier?

I'm genuinely curious how close we are to the tipping point where a company who's primary customer is highly technical types, can start thinking IPv6 first.

If this question doesn't make sense. Some background:

I'm forever pondering creating either an IAAS or SAAS type product/startup, and having dived into Docker and LXC on OpenStack, I feel closer than ever to being able to really try it!

But every time I dive in, fire up some hosts on EC2, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Linode, wherever it may be I keep running into a snag... IP Addresses. Fees, Justifications, etc. Always a pain. It's pretty much impossible to fire up a few hundred nodes to give things a proper scale and load balancing test with public IPv4 addresses. So every time I ask myself "I wish I could just only use IPv6". And now I finally want to ask at least a subset of the people who would likely use the things I've been thinking of building, 'Is IPv6 alone, ok?'

4 comments

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From a guy immersed in IPv6 daily: no, it hasn't hit that sweet point of end user adoption, yet. Consumer ISPs are way behind -- at least in the US.
There's your next startup idea! Instead of a vpn-service for privacy/security, offer one to do 4-to-6 proxying.
I actually figured I would have to do this kind of proxy or in the least offer a tunnel broker as part of any 'IPv6 only' service, if only for the purpose of helping potential customers actually access the service they would pay for.