IPv6 Adoption Growing Thanks to Go Daddy

The free pool of IPv4 internet addresses was exhausted this year, which has now led to an increase in support for the next generation IPv6 addressing system.

According to a report issued by networking vendor Infoblox, IPv6 support in .com, .net and .org zones has grown by 1,900 percent over the last 12 months. Even with the massive growth year-over-year gains, overall IPv6 zone adoption still has a long way to go. The Infoblox report pegged IPv6 adoption across the .com, .net and .org zones at 25.4 percent up from only 1.27 percent in 2010.

While the Infoblox report shows an upward trend for IPv6, the overall sample that was taken is miniscule. Only 1 percent of the domains in the .com, .net and .org zones were examined. The study methodology looked to see if a nameserver had an IPv6 AAAA DNS record in place and is not indicative of usage of web or mail servers.

That said, the bulk of the big gain in the last 12 months is being attributed to IPv6 adoption in zones administered by registrar Go Daddy. The Infoblox report noted that without Go Daddy, IPv6 adoption across the .com, .net and .org zones was only 3 percent.

According to the Infoblox report, Go Daddy’s adoption of IPv6 illustrates how a single large registrar can have substantial influence on global IPv6 adoption. While Go Daddy has expanded IPv6 adoption, it's not being used for mail or web servers.

"GoDaddy.com's deployment — with a handful of exceptions — is limited to DNS only," the Infoblox sponsored report states. "Mail servers and web servers for the hosted zones are almost entirely IPv4 only."

Looking at IPv6 adoption by geography, the report identified France, the U.S. and the Czech Republic as the top three countries for IPv6 adoption.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.