Is it possible to have a usable domain without a VPS or a static IP address?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Inkstainthebat@pawb.social⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I’ve been thinking about finally getting myself a proper domain for my server, but a friend told me that to get one I either need a VPS with a public ip (which just takes all the fun out of selfhosting) or purchase a static ip, which is beyond what I’m willing to spend for a hobby. Do I have any good options or should I just let it go?

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mantra@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Could you use dynamic DNS? Pretty sure there are some free options.

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- cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  One of the better free options is FreeDNS, but you are limited to 5 records.
  
  If you want your own domain, I would suggest Porkbun. They have an API that can be used for dynamic DNS.
  
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  - Bakkoda@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I have used FreeDNS for so long I don’t remember and never ever had a problem. I have a few domains i don’t even use set to public as well.
    
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  - i_am_somebody@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    +1 for freedns!
    
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- lumen@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Something like deSEC.io allows you to use your own domain for dynamic DNS for free.
  
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fozid@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’ve had a domain with a dynamic up for over a year with no problems. I have a simple script that runs every 30mins to check if my IP has changed, then updates the DNS records when required.

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UnpledgedCatnapTipper@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I run a variety of self hosted things via my domain on a dynamic IP. I just have dynamic dns set up to check my current public IP periodically, and update the dns entry if it changes.

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ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Our setup uses a domain pointed at a dynamic (but stable) IP with a script to update it periodically

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Svinhufvud@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It is very much possible to have a dynamic IP and a usable domain.

Both Cloudflare and desec.io (for example) have APIs that you can hit everytime your public IP changes.

I have a script that checks every minute whether my public IP has changed from the last check, and if it has, an API call will be sent.

With a scheme like this, your downtime will be minimal, if ever even noticed.

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mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
What you’re looking for is called Dynamic DNS. I use Cloudflare for my DNS (which feels a little like making a deal with the devil) and Cloudflare-DDNS to automatically update my DNS records when my WAN IP changes. Basically, the container checks the current WAN IP, checks the current Cloudflare DNS records, and pushes a change if they don’t match. It runs every few minutes, and then rests again until the next check. I’m sure other DNS providers have similar ways to set up DDNS.

It’s not a 100% foolproof thing, because your WAN IP changing will take a few minutes to update. But a few minutes of downtime is much better IMO, when the alternative is needing to manually VPN into my server (if the VPN even still works, since the WAN IP changed), and troubleshoot it every time the IP address changes.

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- Joelk111@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You can configure it to run as often as you want (well, I’m not sure about cloudflare, but with other services you can, like DuckDNS)
  
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  - mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yeah, I personally prefer to keep things running fairly light. I’m not running a 99.9% uptime server with hundreds/thousands of users, so I can tolerate a 0-5 minute downtime every few days.
    
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Bakkoda@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’ve been self hosting for 20 years with the same domain(s) and have never owned a static IP. Use a reliable DNS service with simple update tools (curl on a cron job for example).

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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters

DNS Domain Name Service/System

IP Internet Protocol

VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

[Thread #181 for this comm, first seen 18th Mar 2026, 09:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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Sunnydmess@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I use this, Cloudflare zero trust. I run a connector (tunnel) named cloudflared on a raspberry pi which connects to cloudflare. The zerotrust tunnel configuration (in CF dashboard) lets me route http traffic into my local network by domain. The Application access policy in zero trust lets me secure it.

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- irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I realize there is a lot of back and forth among selfhosters about Cloudflare’s usage, but I am thoroughly pleased with the set up. The only thing I chuckle about is their promotional emails.
  
  Your site saw more threats last month than the average site on Cloudflare. Here’s what that means: The good news is that these threats were mitigated by Cloudflare with the basic web application firewall (WAF) and bot protection you have on the Free plan. The bad news is that more complex and sophisticated cyber attacks may not be stopped by your current web application security posture.
  
  …however they promise if I spend some money, that will all go away, and it might, but it’s good now so don’t wake the sleeping dog.
  
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  - TrippinMallard@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    You can use Netbird reverse proxy to connect your domain to any device on your mesh. Netbird cloud supports the reverseproxy too now if you don’t want to self host netbird on a VPS.
    
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drone509@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It is possible to use a dynamic DNS service. They’re typically pretty cheap. I did for several years. It kind of sucked so I rented a VPS.

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- Inkstainthebat@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  In what way did it suck?
  
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  - drone509@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Keeping hardware running 24/7 cheaply is difficult. Expanding an existing setup is expensive. Consumer grade ISP’s will block unexpected network protocols sometimes seemingly for no reason. Dynamic DNS isn’t super robust, so several times I went on vacation and the DNS service would flake. Maybe it’s better if you pay more for it, but I have no complaints about my VPS. It’s nice to be able to just reliably reach my web stuff and not worry a cat bumped the power cable.
    
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entheo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I believe cloudflare has some sort of tunneling option but I’ve never really looked into it, it might get around that.

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- Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It does, yeah. If you aren’t averse to cloudflare then it’s a great option.
  
  From memory I think it’s limited to http/https traffic, but that’s normally not an issue, just have all your services behind a reverse proxy.
  
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IronKrill@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
My dynamic IP rarely changes. When it does, it gets updated by a Docker favonia/cloudflare-ddns image. I have yet to notice downtime.

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fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
My dynamic IP almost never changes. I’ve had 3 in the last 10 years. How often does yours change?

There’s also dynamic dns if yours changes often.

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cecilkorik@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You don’t have any great options but you do have some options. You’ll need dynamic DNS, which you can get for free by various providers. This will manage a “dynamic” DNS entry for your occasionally changing, non-static IP at home. The dynamic DNS entry won’t be on your own domain name, it will be on the provider’s domain name. But wait! That’s just step one.

You can still get your own, fully-functional domain name, and you can have all the domains and subdomains you want, and set them up however you want, with one important restriction: You can’t use IP addresses (because yours is dynamic, and changes all the time and you would have to be constantly updating your domain every time it does, and there would be delays and downtime while everything gets updated).

Instead, your personal domains have to use CNAME records. This substitutes the IP from a different domain INTO your domain. So you CNAME every entry on your own fancy domains to point at your dynamic DNS provider, which manages the dynamic part of the problem for you and always gives the real IP you need. Nobody sees the dynamic DNS name, it’s there, but it’s happening behind the scenes, they still see your fancy personalized domain names.

It’s still not going to be perfect, it won’t work well or at all for certain services like email hosting (self-hosting this is not for the faint of heart anyway) that are very strict about how their DNS and IP addresses need to be set up, but it will likely be good enough for 99% of the stuff you want to self-host.

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marud@piefed.marud.fr ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If you already have a domain name and don’t want to switch to something else, know that some DNS registrar have an API to handle the domains. For a short period of time I had to rely on this and had a little python script to get my current IP and apply it to every A record in my DNS zone. It worked well (but then I ~~took an arrow in the knee~~ had static IP)

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- tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah I still do this. I have a cronjob on one of my servers that runs every five minutes, checks if the upstream DNS IP matches my public IP and, if not, sets it. Adding 60s TTL, this means an average downtime of 3 minutes per change, max 6 minutes.
  
  It’s also possible to use different nameservers than the one the registrar provides, in case the registrar doesn’t have a proper API for DNS.
  
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Borger@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Nobody else mentioned DuckDNS. It’s free and has worked great for me for years.

You’ll need to install a client that syncs/auto-updates your public IP, then pretty much never touch it again.

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- rustyricotta@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This is my solution as well. If you’ve got a OpenWRT router, you can have the router itself update the IP.
  
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imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
My ISP changes IP somewhere around once a month. I own a domain on porkbun and they offer a simple docker compose script that updates my records to a current IP.

I believe other domain selling platforms also have similar scripts or solutions.

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modcolocko@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The VPS I rent from Ionos for tunneling is $2 a month just so you know it’s not a major amount of money.

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- prenatal_confusion@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Same. Best decision I ever made. Pangolin and netbird are killing it!
  
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Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
DynDNS is your friend.

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eksb@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If your home IP does not change often, you can use a dynamic DNS service. But your services will be unavailable from the time that your IP changes and the time the DNS record is updated and the cached responses expire.

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- Jozav@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Do you need to update your (Let’s Encrypt) certificates after an ip change?
  
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  - Ooops@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    No.
    
    Let’s Encrypt checks if you have control over the server the name eventually leads to, usually by providing you with a token that you put on your server for retrieval. The way there, including the IP, is irrelevant.
    
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  - eksb@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    No.
    
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Unsealed9041@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You might want to try out Tailscale. It’s a mesh network overlay that you can either share easily within your tailnet or out to the greater internet with funnel (sorta like cloudflare tunnels, but somewhat better at respecting privacy). It’s also possible to self host the controller, so you don’t have to depend on a third party.

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lavander@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You need static IP only if you want to host the autoritative DNS server for your domain (spoiler alert: you don’t).

You don’t need to proxy your traffic via VPS (higher latency for no good reason) and the dyndns providers are over priced.

What you need is:

Buy your domain

Use a free DNS provider (I used for years the excellent dns.he.net but it is a bit cumbersome. Nowadays I gave up and I now use cloudflare without any proxying, just pure DNS)

Point your registrar to the dns provider

use ddclient to update the IP of a domain entry (e.g. server.example.com)

add as many CNAME as you want that point to that entry (so you can have stuff like Jellyfin.example.com www.example.com Nextcloud.example.com)

That’s all… ddclient will update that single dns entry every time your server restarts (or the IP lease expires and you get a new IP)

The only thing you need to pay here is the domain (you can get free domains but that is another story and tbh I would not recommend, there are cheap domains out of there)
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- Everyday0764@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  mhh I don’t think this works behind cgnat…
  
  it works if you have a dynamic public ip. Where I’m from, generally, they give you a natted ip.
  
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  - lavander@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    For sure, you need a public (dynamic) IP for this.
    
    NAT sucks, been there, done that… ugh! And, yeah, nothing can be done short of some sort of proxing that adds latency and unreliability
    
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TrippinMallard@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You can use netbird cloud’s reverseproxy to point your domain to a device on your wireguard mesh.

That way your home server can be under 3x NATs and swap IPs 50 times and you’ll still be fine.

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ragingHungryPanda@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I started with dynamic DNS on my home server, then moved to an encrypted tunnel. the issue with ddns is that your provider may block your ports. Mine eventually blocked 80, 443, and the wire guard port.

When I switched to tunnels, with cloudflare as my provider, there was nothing my provider could do about it.

So, I’d recommend tunnels since many providers don’t want residential users hosting servers.

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foster@lemmy.hangdaan.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You do not need a static IP address or dynamic DNS if your domain registrar provides a REST API. My current registrar is Porkbun and they have a REST API. I simply have a cron job that regularly checks if my public IP[^1] differs from the domain’s A-record. If it does, it updates the record to match the public IP address.

[^1]: I use Porkbun’s ping endpoint to obtain my public IP.

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- JetpackJackson@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  TIL porkbun can do that. Would that help with hosting behind a CGNAT?
  
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tburkhol@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If you only need it to be accessible inside your home, then you just need to run your own DNS. Have your dhcp point at your DNS and your DNS declare itself the master for your domain.

To get full functionality, you’ll probably want to have your registrar point to the public IP you get from your ISP as the domain’s authoritative name server.You should be able to script it to update the registrar when your ISP changes your IP, but that usually happens infrequently enough to do manually. Obviously can’t do that if you’re behind CGNAT.

To get Lets Encrypt certificates, you can do the DNS challenge. If your ISP gives you a (even inconsistent) public IP, you can do fancy ‘views’ with your selfhosted DNS, where it responds with private IPs inside your network and your ISP-given IP outside your network. I have certbot set up to expose my DNS & web server just before it starts its renewal process, then close the firewall after. Once you have the certificate, you can move it to where ever it will actually be used.

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MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t have a static IP, and I just make sure to never ever let my DHCP lease expire. My ISP provides the same IP to the same MAC when renewing the lease. My longest streak on the same IP was three years.

As long as I always turn my router off by cutting the power, it won’t release the lease, so I keep my IP even through reboots. My last one didn’t release the lease at all, so it only ever got a mew IP if it wass off for over a day, or if I set a new MAC…

When my IP does change, I’ve configured my DNS record to only last an hour. So updating the domaim to point to a new IP only takes an hour to update.

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rosco385@lemmy.wtf ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Image

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czl@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If you’re self hosting you could even use github.com/qdm12/ddns-updater and skip a third-party service (if your registrar accepts dynamic entries)

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Mubelotix@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Sure, you can just use your home wifi. Some of them are static, and others don’t change really often, like once a month, so dyndns will work well. You could also use cloudflared that is a proxy you can use even if you can’t open your ports

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Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
IP	Internet Protocol
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

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