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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't self-hosted a website in a long time. Do you still need a static IP in order to do so, or do you have some kind of service that updates the IP? How does it interact with DNS?

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I'm using a Caddy app I wrote that updates my DNS records, and it works for any DNS provider that has an API: https://github.com/mholt/caddy-dynamicdns/

There are "Dynamic DNS" services with a small daemon you install on your server that continuously update the DNS address so it remains online even if your ISP changes your IP on you.

https://account.dyn.com/

https://www.noip.com/remote-access

btw this can be done with a 'proper' domain name too (e.g. at namecheap)

yep, I've done this before with a handy tool called ddclient, although there are other tools out there.

Isn't there a small time window during which your site is unaccessible due to DNS propagation time?

I use Cloudflare for my domains, it has a REST API, I wrote a small Python script which updates the A record for all my domains. My IP addresses change at least monthly, but I never noticed any outage.

https://github.com/kissgyorgy/cloudflare-dyndns

Ah, but have your users?

I use dynamic dns, a short ttl and have an external check on some services - they ping once a minute and never report downtime.

Wow that is pretty impressive!

In my experience the only time Att or Comcast change your IP is when there is a power outage. I have had to manually update the DNS record for my home computer only once in the last 3 years.

Something I want to experiment with is IPv6 DNS. IPv6 has enough address space that individual devices are universally uniquely addressable. With an AAAA record you can point DNS at an IPv6 address. So I want to try setting DNS to point to a specific device... though I haven't gotten around to it yet.

IPv6 DNS certainly works, as long as you're not using ISP provided home equipment that's too stupid to let you allow incoming connections on IPv6; but only if you always have IPv6 access where you want to access the things from.

IPv6 on public WiFi or corporate networks isn't a given, and where I live, neither is cell coverage, so I wouldn't want IPv6 only for important services.

I wanted to try this too, but my Comcast IPv6 prefix is unstable, and keeps changing.

It makes it difficult to even use IPv6 internally, because the LAN tracks the prefix, so addresses keep changing.

If you aren't already aware, you probably want to use Network Prefix Translation (NPT) with Comcast.

I've been told that, and my router is pfSense, which claims that it is possible, but the documentation says something along the lines of "You can use NPT!" and then doesn't explain HOW.

I haven't figured it out yet.

I do mine with a dynamic IP. I use DynDNS (with the ddclient daemon running on my Linux router to update records when my IP changes). It hasn't failed me yet.

I'm using a cron job to update A records for my domain at Namecheap, they have an API for updating IPv4.

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