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).
2nd, but with just a bash script.
Also, I'm forwarding http & https to different IPs and the best thing about cloudflare is that you can restrict those ports to only be open when coming from cloudflare's proxy. I like the extra layer of security, and dislike that they can see all traffic..
I've also been on freedns.afraid.org for many years. Back when I switched from dyndns, it wasn't possible to get Let's Encrypt certificates on afraid.org's domains, but that might have changed. I worked around it by taking a domain I already owned and using a CNAME to point it at my afraid.org domain.
If you only need public access to things like HTTP or SSH you don’t necessarily need to run dynamic ip and just setup Cloudflare Tunnels. So far I haven’t needed to put anything public that doesn’t run on the provided tunnels.
Look under the Zero Trust category and then once there you'll see another menu item called Access. There you'll find Tunnels, in addition to Tunnels you can add an Application in the same Access menu to create policies that only allow certain clients to connect.
Cloudflare tunnels is the way to go for small self hosted content. You’re hiding behind their ddos protection and your IP / location remains hidden from end users.
your domain provider probably has an api to update dns records i use cloudflare with their api because then i can hide my ip behind their proxy or if i don't have a public ip i can use their tunnels
I use DuckDNS. There's been only one outage for the ~2 years I've been using it and it's free. I also use DuckDNS to acquire the SSL certificates for the reverse proxy.
If you mean automatically update IP part, duckdns website has a very comprehensive guide.
If you mean getting a free SSL certificate, you can use acme.sh (this is what I used) which has integrated support for duckddns (To use let's encrypt you need to use --server letsencrypt in your command)
I used duckdns for my jellyfin server, but after a week or so I started getting malicious site warnings from Firefox, and had to ‘accept the risk and continue’ every time. Ended up going back to noip. It’s a pain to renew every month, but I haven’t had any other problems with it.
I use noip as well, but because I only have an IP camera on that network, and the camera has built-in DDNS support for noip. But I hate it having to renew monthly.
First step would be to ensure that you can do port forwarding.
Check if your IP address isn't a private one or CGNAT.
Now set up reverse proxy and try connecting to your service. If it connects, you are okay.
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.
I have NameCheap as well. I was trying to set this up with the ddclient on OPNSense but the logs suggested it couldn't connect to NameCheap. What do you need to authenticate other than the DDNS passcode supplied by NameCheap?
I should automate something like that too. I just have one A record pointing to my IP and all my subdomains CNAME’d to that so that if it ever changes, I just have to update that one record.
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.
@starkcommando@lemmy.world dyndns worked fine. Duckdns is a preferred among self hosters. Also your domain name provider might also offer dynamic dns sometimes
I have NameCheap as well. I found their Windows client after I made this post. I'm still curious is there are better services out there. It seems Cloudflare may have the best tools for security for a webserver, i.e. hiding the real IP address.
Cloudflare has a lot of great tools and provides service to most of the internet. Some folks don't like how much of internet traffic is routed though Cloudflare... sort of like Google and if that's not a bother then it may be a good choice.
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'm still using noip.com. There may be better/cheaper options these days, but this has worked well for me for years, and I don't see the need to change.
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