So what are server hosts going to do now? If I need to scale up and order some more servers when are we going to get to the point where they say no?
I assume that server hosts are going to start charging larger and larger sums of money per month for more than a single IP on a server in order to claw back some of their allocation from their customers in cases where people didn't really need so many. But how long can this go on?
Up until now, the rational choice was to dole out as many IPv4 addresses as possible, in order to justify a larger allocation from ARIN. Now that the party's over, we should expect ISPs and hosting providers to become more stingy with their addresses: more NATs, more proxies, higher prices.
Any new providers that pop up between now and the date IPv4 becomes irrelevant will be at a competitive disadvantage.
Thus finishing the imprimatur[1]. It is an utter travesty that we haven't junked IPv4 yet. NAT removes the most powerful feature of the internet - that anybody can publish without the permission of a central authority - and I fear too many people in the software industry profit from the resulting centralization to resist things like carrier grade NAT.
> the date IPv4 becomes irrelevant
That date was 03-Feb-2011 at the latest[2].
> competitive disadvantage.
The problem is the people with larger IPv4 address blocks who se this competitive disadvantage as a good thing.
From the perspective of the ISP many customers are totally incapable of implementing NAT and waste IP addresses like they are dollar bills at the strip club.
I suppose that it would be that easy if we were hosting a website. We make an online game though so the general solution isn't going to work for us.
Sure, in principal it's the same but it's going to require a fair bit more manual implementation in our case, not to mention added latency in a very latency sensitive application.
I think your exaggerating the latency effects but anyway you can still buy IPv4 addresses for ~$12/ip. This is really just going to initially hurt service providers which is good because those are the ones who can make large inroads with IPv6
NATs do induce a fair amount of latency. It's not exaggerated. Watch Paul Saab from Facebook talk about how much better IPv6 performs at NANOG 64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfjdOc41g0s
They're likely referring to scenarios like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8278864 - "IPv6 privacy addresses crashed the MIT CSAIL network"
& the much more complicated host discovery / address assignment process on IPv6 segments.
Still, I think I'd rather deal with some implementation kinks than intentional packet mangling like NAT.
- own a pseudo-TLD like .com.me and are really just creating subdomains
- have a large account / custom pricing deals with a domain registrar such that despite a high total cost, the marginal per-domain cost is approximately $0
- only internally-routable domains e.g. /etc/hosts or company-internal DNS server
- only alternative DNS roots like Namecoin or tor's .onion domains
I assume that server hosts are going to start charging larger and larger sums of money per month for more than a single IP on a server in order to claw back some of their allocation from their customers in cases where people didn't really need so many. But how long can this go on?