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Do you have a static IP?

I have a homelab too but getting “enterprise grade” service from comcast seems to be my biggest barrier to scaling without leaning on aws.

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Hey, you actually have a few options, notably, doing nothing!

Comcast doesn't actually change your public IP address between DHCP renewals and thus it's effectively static. The only time that it'll change is when the modem is powered off for an amount of time, or the upstream DOCSIS concentrator is powered off for maintenance or otherwise.

So: arbitrarily and without warning.

Sure; however, I’ve had the same IP on Comcast residential for a little over a decade. There are many endeavors that could fade that low a frequency of IP changing.

I would be more worried about violating the ISP's terms of service. Running a business based on that seems pretty precarious.

What’s the worst that can realistically happen?

If you don't have another provider option, you stand to lose Internet as a utility for your residence, which many would consider a pretty poor situation.

Has that ever happened in practice? I find it very hard to believe that a company normally so desperate for new business as to spam people with sales calls and lock people into contracts (to make sure they can't leave once the service ends up being sub-par) would suddenly start saying no to people's money and cutting them off based on a technicality.

I wrote a script that basically hits an offsite DNS with my latest IP. It's worked quite well. I think in the past 4 years I have had Comcast, they haven't changed my IP once.

Dynamic DNS (dDNS) works here[0]. You have free services like no-ip, and also most paid domain registrars support this. I know both Namecheap and AWS Route 53 support it if you want it at your own domain. Essentially, it's a cron curling with an API key from the host machine, that's it. Works great in my experience.

Keep in mind you will have a small downtime until the new IP is registered. Also the cache TTL of your domain will be very low, so your site will have a small loading time penalty from time to time.

I use this. It's fabulous.

Rent a $5 VPS, run a VPN tunnel from your lab to that box, and run a reverse proxy on it. You'll get some additional latency, but that's about it.

Caution: you may end up with your packets blackholing on the way for unknown reasons after temporary loss of connectivity.

I think it might have something to do with the NAT forgetting about my UDP "connection", but haven't found the culprit yet.

Could be because you’re using a terrible ISP-provided router. Switch that to bridge mode and connect the server directly (if necessary, use the server as a router with a second network card for your LAN) or use a proper, enterprise-grade router (OpenWRT would work as well as long as the underlying hardware is performant enough).

> Switch that to bridge mode

Sadly, not possible on a shared residential connection. I tried the setup where the server was also the router, and that was much less convenient in case of failures than having a dedicated router.

But yes, the abundance of routers is definitely a problem here, with an OpenWRT and a FritzBox in the mix. Perhaps I should try to get IPv6 running and forget about NAT woes.

For a while with my home lab I cronned a python script to look up my external DNS and update my domain in Route53 (and Dyn before that). Worked out pretty well, I think it only updated once or twice in two years.

I have a static IP address / gigabit thru centurylink

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