this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
62 points (93.1% liked)

Selfhosted

59973 readers
425 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:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts here are to be centered around self-hosting. Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or git here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

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
[–] lavander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You need static IP only if you want to host the autoritative DNS server for your domain (spoiler alert: you don’t).

You don’t need to proxy your traffic via VPS (higher latency for no good reason) and the dyndns providers are over priced.

What you need is:

  • Buy your domain
  • Use a free DNS provider (I used for years the excellent dns.he.net but it is a bit cumbersome. Nowadays I gave up and I now use cloudflare without any proxying, just pure DNS)
  • Point your registrar to the dns provider
  • use ddclient to update the IP of a domain entry (e.g. server.example.com)
  • add as many CNAME as you want that point to that entry (so you can have stuff like Jellyfin.example.com www.example.com Nextcloud.example.com)

That’s all… ddclient will update that single dns entry every time your server restarts (or the IP lease expires and you get a new IP)

The only thing you need to pay here is the domain (you can get free domains but that is another story and tbh I would not recommend, there are cheap domains out of there)

[–] Everyday0764@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

mhh I don't think this works behind cgnat...

it works if you have a dynamic public ip. Where I'm from, generally, they give you a natted ip.

[–] lavander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago

For sure, you need a public (dynamic) IP for this.

NAT sucks, been there, done that… ugh! And, yeah, nothing can be done short of some sort of proxing that adds latency and unreliability