this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
60 points (92.9% liked)

Selfhosted

60911 readers
851 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.

  8. AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

Also, if this isn't the correct community for this, I'd appreciate being pointed to the right one, thank you

Update: after reading the comments the two main options I'm considering now are either a cheap VPS to use as proxy for my network via wireguard, or DynamicDNS. I'll see if I can figure out the rest from here, thank you!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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)

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.