CloudFlare launched publicly exactly one year ago today. In that year, we have grown from virtually no traffic to powering more than 15 billion page views for 350 million unique visitors in the last month. Today, to celebrate CloudFlare's birthday, we thought we'd give our users a present in the form of a new feature.
The Internet's Growing Pains
CloudFlare set out to solve the Internet's biggest challenges. One of the challenges a lot of people talk about, but few people are doing anything about, is the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. That changes today.
The IPv4 protocol was designed in the 1970s. It was built to accommodate about 4 billion devices connecting to the network. That seemed like a lot at the time, but the explosive growth of the Internet means we're closing in on that number. In order to grow, a new protocol was created: IPv6.
Unfortunately, the IPv4 and IPv6 networks are incompatible. Unless you have a gateway of some kind, if you're on one you can't visit websites on the other. And, even more unfortunately, the gateway solutions typically are hardware-based and cost tens of thousands of dollars per website to deploy. This means that most the world's websites are unavailable for the 1% of the Internet that is already using IPv6. And the percentage of users on IPv6 is only going to grow.
CloudFlare's Solution
At CloudFlare, we realized we were in a unique position to solve this problem. Today we're publicly launching CloudFlare's Automatic IPv6 Gateway. To enable it, sign up for CloudFlare or login to your account and visit your CloudFlare Settings page at:
CloudFlare.com > My websites > Settings (pull down menu) > CloudFlare settings
You can choose two options: (FULL) which will enable IPv6 on all subdomains that are CloudFlare Enabled, or (SAFE) which will automatically create specific IPv6-only subdomains (e.g., www.ipv6.yoursite.com). You do not need to change any of your DNS settings. After it is up and running, you can test your IPv6 compatibility and get a badge for your site.
We are providing the Automatic IPv6 Gateway for free to all CloudFlare users. We started CloudFlare in order to help solve some of the Internet's toughest challenges. We are proud on our first birthday to be doing our part to help solve another one.
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