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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

The in-between days (after dial-up ISPs, but before "cloud" meant people forgot they could do things themselves) was to host the website on your own computer. For example, an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi, or an always-on-anyway desktop.

I host my personal site this way.

I also host about 100 mostly-static mostly-low-use websites at work similarly: with Apache on a couple of VMs. They are more reliable than the free versions of Netlify etc, and the systems work to maintain 100 static websites is little different to maintaining 5 static websites.

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I'm not sure how you do this unless you have a static IP somehow? In my experience ISPs don't offer that to residential clients

There are "Dynamic DNS" services (a good free one used to be DynDNS in the 00's) that will take an API call from your home system and update a DNS with it.

Many routers have support for this and if your router runs dhcpcd you can tell it to issue the call when it renews the DHCP lease from your ISP, or simply cron job it.

Note that you don't need a marketed-as-"dynamic DNS" provider to have dynamic DNS. You just need a DNS provider with an API.

Cloudflare has a DNS API. So if you search "Cloudflare DDNS" you'll find five or six different Github projects (some binaries, some scripts) you can run on any box in your house (maybe a Pi?) that'll do your DDNS through them.

(You don't need your router to run a DDNS client, even though routers make it seem like a router-exclusive feature. The only thing your router knows that your LAN doesn't is your network's external IP address. But a DDNS client can just hit an external reflector endpoint for that.)

From my experience most ISPs don't give publicly routable addresses anymore, just throwing everybody behind CGNAT (currently I pay extra 3$ monthly fee for static routable IP, but not all providers offer it). And IPv6 is usually still not deployed.

In the US, it's pretty rare to be behind CGNAT or not have IPv6. We're lucky in that regard.

As the other comment says, I've never seen CGNAT in the US. I'm sure it's deployed in some cases, but I've never had to deal with it.

I'm confused about it though. For some applications and games you need to connect peer-to-peer for them to work correctly. How is it possible to connect to a peer with some random port open (e.g. 48295)? It doesn't seem like the ISP could know that the request was aimed at you, if something like UPnP isn't being used. Or does CGNAT simply disable all incoming connections, breaking p2p applications entirely?

Some systems use an internet service to coordinate nat-traversal/hole punching. Other systems just don't work.

They don't, but my ISP-provided modem/router combo has built-in integration with a dynamcic DNS service. If your domain name follows whatever your IP is, it's close enough to static (at least for my uses)

Alternatively, you can use cron/systemd timers to update the domain minutely.

Some ISPs do offer static IPs to residentials users (many of the top 10 here https://www.ispreview.co.uk/review/top10.php)

As IPv6 becomes more widely adopted, there will be no need to conserve IP addresses and everyone can be allocated a block of them.

My IP and a friends have been the same for five+ years even though it’s technically dynamic. DYDNS hasn’t really done much.

In my experience IP addresses rarely change from under you. There has to be actual noticeable outage of service. But in that case you can just use any of the free dynamic dns services. Back in the day I didn’t even have proper domain name I just used dyndns

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