Is it possible to host my website with just an IPv6 without an IPv4?

Question

Basically, here's my situation: I have an old laptop and want to use it to host a website on my home broadband, but my ISP only allows one static IPv4 address on the home connection. I don't want to use this same IPv4 to host a website, as everyone in my household uses the same IP to browse the web and such. I found a service only called TunnelBroker which leases IPv6 addresses, so I signed up and hooked it up to my laptop. So, is it possible to host the website on just this IPv6? Or do I have to use an IPv4 to host the site? If this isn't possible, what would be a better way to host the site, any recommendations?

Update: I ended up keeping the IPv6 by TunnelBroker for IPv6 users only (well, this is one way of encouraging change to ISPs in some way), and am using an Argo Tunnel (Cloudflare Tunnel) instead for all users. I'm using Ubuntu (Server) & NGINX webserver so the setup was fairly straight forward. Regarding site assets (CDN) and speed, I'm going to make the site ask the user if they have an IPv6 already; if they say they don't know, I'll put em' through the Argo Tunnel. If not, direct through the IPv6 for site assets. Pretty helpful as I can use my own domain name as well, Cloudflare sets up a CNAME for the tunnel.

I looked into open source projects as well, I wanted a solution that took me minimal effort to maintain; as my site is already on Cloudflare DNS this works for me. Anyways just am adding this edit in here for anyone with the same issue, hope this helps :)

I also found this GitHub full of alternative solutions, it's where I found out about Cloudflare Tunnel.

Answer 1

Technically yes, you can host an IPv6-only website (just like there are IPv4-only websites) – but the issue is that people who only have IPv4 Internet connections won't be able to access it directly. See all the related questions in the sidebar...

To really make this work, you would need to direct your visitors not to your IPv6-only server itself, but to a proxy frontend that has IPv6 and IPv4. There are some public services which support this (e.g. Cloudflare and other CDNs).

You could run your own reverse proxy on a server, though that would probably defeat the point of hosting the site locally – if you're already paying for a server, might as well just host the site there directly.

As a side note, although TunnelBroker is run by a reputable company (Hurricane Electric is a world-wide carrier network), they're still to this day in a feud with Cogent (another world-wide carrier ISP), so IPv6-capable visitors who are using Cogent wouldn't be able to directly connect to your website either. Again, a proxy hosted elsewhere would help with this.

Answer 2

You can surely advertise the ipv6 of your gateway if your ISP is landing you one.

Otherwise, you can use a hosted proxy and advertise it's IP then redirect the traffic form the proxy to your home network. Your "real" ip wouldn't be in DNS record. But you are doing so, I don't think the service would be free, would it ? But then would there be any upside of having your website hosted on your home network? Wouldn't it be easier to host it directly on a third party platform, config effort + fees ?

On a other hand, you can also Nat port 80/443 of your gateway to your old laptop. It would be seamless for the rest of your household (as long as no-one was already listening on port 80/443). Then, your public IP browsing internet (without VPN service), and the IP of your home website would be the same, indeed.

If you have a strong reasoning not to use the same IP for both flows, could you spare 2 minutes to explain me why ?

( btw not sure it is financially interesting, electricity-wise, to have a running home laptop 24/7 vs a hosted site )