As a professional domain name investor, “IPv6” is a term that’s important to understand to fully comprehend the internet infrastructure.
IPv6 stands for Internet Protocol Version 6. It is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol, the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the internet.
IPv6 was introduced to replace IPv4, which had a limited number of IP addresses available for allocation. Unlike IPv4, which uses a 32-bit addressing scheme allowing for around 4.3 billion unique addresses, IPv6 uses a 128-bit scheme, allowing for a virtually unlimited number of unique addresses. An IPv6 address looks like this: ‘2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334’.
In relation to domain investing, understanding IPv6 is relevant because every website on the internet is hosted on a server with an IP address. When a domain name is typed into a web browser, the Domain Name System (DNS) translates that domain name into the IP address of the server where the website is hosted.
While as a domain investor, you don’t deal directly with IP addresses or IPv6, having a grasp of how they work can provide a deeper understanding of the broader internet infrastructure that underpins the value of domain names.