I don't have a specific answer to your question but if you wanted to get some rough numbers based on your current visitors, create an A record and a different named AAAA record pointing to two images on your site, one being an IPv4 only image and one being an IPv6 only image. This assumes you still have IPv4 for now and are just contemplating dumping it.
ipv4only 1h in a x.x.x.x
ipv6only 1h in aaaa x:x:x:x:x:x:x:x
Then in your apex/root page lazy-load the two images ideally in a way that won't block rending the page if one of the images does not load. One image references the ipv4only domain name and the other image references the ip6only domain name. Both of those domains should be added as aliases to your main virtual host. People can also see visually which versions they can reach. Others here can probably suggest the best way to do this that will not affect the speed of your site. You can then parse your access logs to see who can load both, one or the other.
ah thank you this is good info. My situation is google cloud offers a free tier ipv4 only vm. To get a dual stack you have to pay for a load balancer. My site has very little traffic so just doing a test on my site alone isn't very good. I was looking for some numbers on the internet in general. Has anyone with a lot of traffic done the above test and can say, oh yeah like 10% of people have ipv6 only?
I'm not familiar with the free tier, but Google Cloud offers direct ipv6 to instances; you shouldn't need a load balancer. You'd need to adjust your network definition to be ipv4+ipv6 instead of ipv4 only; and probably something on your instance too (may potentially need to restart or recreate it, too). There's docs here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ip-addresses/configure...
If you're serving http(s) on standard ports, ipv4 only should be ok. Maybe not ideal, but ok. There's less and less high profile sites doing that, but at least for me, www.reddit.com and www.github.com are both returning only an A record right now; As of now, an internet connection that doesn't get you to github or reddit is clearly deficient, so most consumers have some access to ipv4.
ipv6 may be a little more important if you're doing stuff outside http. For users with ipv6, there's likely to be nat and other network manipulation and restriction on ipv6 vs ipv4. This can be pretty useful for say realtime communications or long mostly idle connections, where CGNAT can cause trouble.
Your subject says "is it costing me users?", but your message says "how many people will be unable to access the site?".
These are two different things.
If your site is slow, it will cost you users. v6 has measurably better performance for websites, so not having it will cost you users. Those users will still be able to access your site though, they'll just choose not to because it's too slow for them.
The practical reality is that almost all client devices that are used for browsing the web will have some mechanism to reach legacy v4-only websites (but the mechanism might itself be a cause of poor performance...).
On the server side, v6-only servers (VPSs/containers/etc) are getting somewhat more common though, so if you're hosting something that's expected to be downloaded directly onto a server then please figure out v6 somehow.
