Web hoster builds on cloud, looks ahead to IPV6

Web Drive says virtual machines are fastest growing part of business

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Tuesday, 06 December 2011
IP address wholesaler Web Drive says it provides about 15 to 20 percent of the co.nz domain registrations.

But the company, like some of its competitors, including Iconz, is seeing traction with cloud services, while it looks ahead to the transition from IPV4 to IPV6 in the coming years.

The company is already having to parcel out IPV4 domains as the number of addresses under the older protocol starts to dry up.

“IPV6 will really turn things on their head,” says Web Drive GM Robin Dickie. “When we talk to a customer and sell them a server or a bunch of servers or a website we have to dole out IP addresses carefully. If someone wants hundreds of addresses, they have to go through a process of applications, making sure it’s justified use and fair use. With IPV6 we could give you a billion IP addresses for your cell phone alone.”

For the time being, however, it’s the cloud and virtualisation that is driving the company’s business currently.

“Probably what we didn’t expect when we first launched the cloud service was how it would take off,” Dickie says. “We had to sell $10,000 a month to recover our investment, and I remember saying, ‘How are we going to do this?’”

“We did that in about a week and now it’s our fastest area of growth, and it is really powering along. That’s within the space of a couple of years.”

Web Drive has a reseller ecosystem of about 500 partners that include IT shops, media companies and web designers. Dickie says 20 percent of domain names are registered through resellers.

The company works with Maxnet to provide the virtual machines in its cloud service.

As for IPV6, the transition is still a number of years off. The ultimate trend Dickie sees is for IP addresses to be assigned to far more objects — such as home appliances and meters — than at this time.

Dickie, however, does not see much opportunity for doing business selling IPV6, especially as few ISPs and relatively few routers support the newer protocol, which with a longer string than IPV4, and support for alphanumeric characters, increases the domain supply exponentially.

“There’s not a huge amount of opportunity at the moment for IPV6 except for future proofing,” says Dickie. “We can have some sort of dual compatibility for when IPV4 isn’t going to be an option….If you’re building a product that needs a lot of addresses IPV4 isn’t going to be an option so it’s really about future proofing. You don’t want to find yourself in five years time with something that only works on IPV4 but you’ve got no IPV6 support or availability.”