I would like to host my own web server with a domain name I purchased but my public IP isn’t static.
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 run ddclient on a local machine and it updates my Cloudflare DNS records if my IP changes.
OPNSense has it built in too, if you use it. So does PFSense, I think. Been a while, might be misremembering.
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.
duckdns and ydns
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.
Where are the settings for these tunnels located in Cloudflare? I was looking around the website last night but didn’t have any luck.
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.
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.
I also use duckdns, but in the last year it went down like twice or something. Its good but not really reliable.
I pay an extra £1 a month to my ISP to get a static address. Figured it’s well worth having no hassle.
I’m using DuckDNS, it has a plugin for pfSense / OpnSense.
I host my own ddns server in a debian container https://wiki.debian.org/DDNS
Here we go down another rabbit hole… 😆
I’ve been using freedns.afraid.org for about a year now.