The Internet ran out of addresses earlier this year when the primary pool of standard IP addresses, based on Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), was depleted. To help ease the transition towards the new IPv6 protocol, CloudFlare today announced a new free service today called Automatic IPv6 Gateway. The new service will allow website owners to take advantage of IPv6 regardless of how their web hosting providers’ infrastructure.

CloudFlare is best known proxy service that provides security features and speeds up websites through a mechanism similar to a content delivery network. It works by directing traffic to a particular domain through CloudFlare’s servers before it passes on to the site’s own Web server(s). This allows CloudFlare to scan incoming traffic for malicious intent, cache images and other static content on servers around the world for faster deliver and, now, to provide backwards compatibility with both IPv6 and IPv4. The basic service is free, and a more advanced package is available for $20 a month. You can find our previous coverage of the company here and here. CloudFlare competes with Incapsula.

It will be a slow process getting all computers, Web hosts and Internet service providers up and running on IPv6, which will provide a much larger (approximately 340 undecillion addresses). You can see our previous coverage of IPv6

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