No-IP has been great for me for about a year now. No complaints.

I’ll check it out! Appreciate the suggestion

I originally thought it was overkill for me, who just needed to access files, until I read about deck, calendar, and chat. Now I’m ultra sold. I’m tired of slack, trello, email, calendar all being in different places.

Also, you don’t need a crazy router to get started. Mine is a crappy $100 router. Most will have port forwarding if you need to expose ports, or ddns if you want a domain name. There are some things you’d want a slightly more powerful router for (like maybe a media server serving most of your house). But you can always upgrade your router.

I have a salvaged desktop in a closet which I use for:

• pihole (adblock and local dns)
• unbound for upstream dns (no more 8.8.8.8 dns for me)
• VPN to access my home network and for some security on public wifi
• NAS (only via sshfs, want to try nextcloud) where data is stored on a software raid array
• a couple SQL databases for a hobby project

Since I have ports exposed (I know), I have it configured for no root login, some default ports are set to non default ports, and I have fail2ban installed.

I’m pretty proud of my setup and it’s made my life and work flow pretty awesome and simplified, especially with the WFH/hybrid stuff.

I want to try nextcloud so I can consolidate my calendar(s?), and get rid of trello as a service, in addition to serving my NAS files. But i want to test drive it first and I dont have a system to do that properly at the moment.