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  • I use a Cloudflare tunnel rather than a dynamic DNS provider. Some in the self hosting community are opposed to Cloudflare, but I appreciate the tools they provide (especially Zero Trust so I can put my self hosted apps behind Okta).

  • First step would be to ensure that you can do port forwarding.

    1. Check if your IP address isn't a private one or CGNAT.
    2. Now set up reverse proxy and try connecting to your service. If it connects, you are okay.
    3. Now this is something i didn't know could happen but it did end up happening to me. I was happily port forwarding for a few months, until suddenly my port forwarding stopped working. Now I called my ISP, they said they did nothing(my ISP is a few guys who have no Idea about what they are doing, the other option to them is 512kbps DSL connection) at this point all my ingress ports are blocked and even outgoing ssh is blocked. Then the new month starts and everything is working again. I looked at my ISP website to get an idea of what may have caused this and the case seems to be that it was the first time I crossed 100GB in uploading. So my ISP has configured things such a way that port forwarding only works for the first 100GB of uploading.

    This is why I strongly recommend cloudfare tunnel or any other similar solution.

  • DNS-O-Matic (recommended by CloudFlare, among others) combined with SWAG and Authelia will handle dynamic DNS, reverse proxying, SSL certificates, and MFA. SWAG (nginx, Let's Encrypt and Certbot) and Authelia (MFA) run nicely in a 2 container Docker stack.

    Mine have been running for 18 months on my NAS, though I have a fixed IP so no longer use a DDNS provider.

  • Aside from a brief scare a couple of months ago, when the owner/operator was unreachable and the configuration interface and some automatic update paths were not working, I have been using afraid.org, and it has proven to be a stellar service, and free for basic needs.

  • I pay an extra £1 a month to my ISP to get a static address. Figured it's well worth having no hassle.

  • Before, I used to use duckdns. Completely free and super simple
    Nowadays I just have a docker container that updates my A records on my domain directly through namesilo's API. Took like 5 mins to set up the config

  • I just have a cron script running on a machine that does something like this every 10 seconds

     undefined
        
    C_IP=`dig +short my.domain`
    IP=`curl https://api.ipify.org`
    if(C_IP != IP) {
        updateRoute53(IP)
    }
    
    
      

    This is just for my main home server. Gets the job done because if it's out of date for a few seconds nothing matters.

  • AdGuard! They even have installable profiles for Apple devices, so I get ad blocking even on mobile!

    mb, DDNS. nvm

    • OP is asking about DDNS instead of DNS. They want a fixed address to their ever changing IP address.

71 comments