IPv6 VPS

Claire Furney

• 2 min read
IPv6 VPS
Photo by Umberto / Unsplash

I recently questioned the $5 I was spending a month on the Vultr instance I hosted a few sites on including this. I noticed they had a $2.50 offering which although had only half as much RAM at 512 MB, could probably just about cope with a mysql database for the TNG (genealogy) site no one ever looked at, IF I moved this site to a static "jamstack" type set up.

After struggling to find where to provision a $2.50 instance through the management dashboard, it finally popped up after selecting a couple of the US data centers, catch number one. The next catch was it was IPv6 only. Wasn't sure what this would mean exactly, but I determined to get it working.

The first challenge was that my own ISP (Virgin Media) couldn't reach the IPv6 web. I solved this by setting up a free tunnel with Hurricane Electric as outlined here: http://xenodium.com/working-with-vultrs-ipv6-only-instances/.

The second challenge was that I did actually want my server to be accessible from the IPv4 web (some potentially old stats had that only 10% people can access the IPv6 web currently). Trying to work out what I needed to get this in place, I landed upon an alternative VPS provider based in the UK called Mythic Beasts who have a great blog article and also some reasonably priced VMs a bit closer to home: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2020/02/28/ipv6-only-hosting-in-2020/. I decided after reading this article and understanding things a whole load better, that I didn't want to bother with IPv6 anymore, but that I did really like Mythic Beasts and I would transition over to one of their servers at £4.70 a month (plus VAT), their cheapest offering and 1 GB RAM. Went to order it - yikes! the IPv4 was an add on at £2 extra a month! All started to make sense. Although one good thing about Mythic Beasts was that they had the gateways in place to make accessing the IPv6 web a lot smoother, the fact was I already had an IPv4 UK based VPS for less money from Vultr.

Trawling more I THEN found an outfit in Switzerland who were doing super discounts on their IPv6 only servers - only 2.5CHF - but this time 1 GB RAM. They also offered various gateway infrastructure to make it easy for your IPv6 only server to be visible from the IPv4 web (albeit having to email support). This felt a bit more like worth the pain, and Switzerland was a whole lot closer to home. All in all this was by far the best offer. And even though they had the various gateways available (unlike Vultr), by configuring Cloudflare the whole pain dropped away anyway. They also looked funky.

Some useful links for Data Center Light.

Setup

Writing this two months later and largely forgotten what I did now!

  1. Purchase VM from ipv6hosting - choose Ubuntu 20.04 image
  2. During setup specify ssh key to be added to the root login (though at first a password is also requested, and you can login either way after provisioning).
  3. After successful provisioning, ssh using ssh -6 root@ipv6-address-of-vm
  4. Following hardening guide to set up a new user and configure the firewall (e.g. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu-20-04)
  5. Copy ssh keys over to the new user
  6. SSH using new user
  7. Install nginx and mysql for TNG
  8. ...