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.
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I'm new to self-hosting. All I did so far was install Ubuntu Server, enable SSH and tried setting up DuckDNS, which I could not set up automatic update of my IP following the documentation, neither updating manually through the website, which even though seems to be changed, when I ssh the domain, I get the initial IP
Anyone using DuckDNS? Is it working properly for you guys? Did I just mess something up?
What other DDNS providers would you recommend me?
You could be behind CGNAT - I'm not sure the best way to tell but it could be the reason.
I would also highly recommend buying a cheap domain to use - it would be the price of a coffee per year but makes life so much easier and you don't have to depend on duckdns. You can buy through cloudflare, porkbun or many other options which you can search for a good DDNS service to update them.
I read briefly about CGNAT, a d I think this is the case, checking the IP of my services with external services I get an IP different from the one I see in my machine. Tested more than one DDNS service and all updated my IP with the same "wrong" value.
How do I solve this? Should I contact my ISP and hope they can provide a solution?
Yeah, first try your ISP to see if you can get a dynamic or fixed IP instead. Check if their website/FAQ mentions dynamic IP or cgnat. They might outright reject it, or try to upgrade you to an extortionate business package though. I signed up for my service and checked the cgnat before signing up but they hadn't got around to updating their website that they changed their policy. After the surprise of being behind cgnat and after screenshotting their own website, I complained and hit upgraded to a higher level package for free.
You can use tailscale to get around it, but then you need to install it on all devices and login. You can use cloudflare tunnels and think you can set it to not require login for some services. Both rely on third parties. Both are also safer than exposing directly to the public internet.
If you want full control, you have to rent a cheap vps and setup a tunnel between that and your home server, then use the public IP of the vps for your services. Wireguard is probably the best choice for VPN. You could try pangolin, which is an open source cloudflare tunnel so is more complicated than a VPN but also includes a reverse proxy.