hi everyone,

I was just about to self-host a Ghost blog but then was warned that my ISP might change my external IP address at any time, so I would need to pay for a static IP address.

Is that true?

(I’d not seen much about that in stuff I’ve looked up so far about self hosting)

  • Paddy66@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Thank you for your replies everyone!

    I’m looking into DDNS. Before I go with a provider, I notice that my router has this functionality built in. Should I use that?

    (It’s an Asus RT-AX86U Pro - so fairly chunky in terms of spec)

    For reference, the set up is:

    Docker containers for

    1. Ghost
    2. Nginx Proxy Manager
    • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      (It’s an Asus RT-AX86U Pro - so fairly chunky in terms of spec)

      I have your exact router make and model! I self host my own server with a domain on my home network and make use of the built in DDNS feature.

      My domain registrar is Cloudflare so I have to use a custom script for DDNS, if you’re in the same boat I can provide the script.

      I would suggest looking into Asus WRT Merlin Firmware, the custom firmware enables more functionality to your router.

      Docker containers for

      1. Ghost
      2. Nginx Proxy Manager

      When hosting a reverse proxy like Nginx, Traefik, SWAG, Pangolin, etc keep in mind you 80:80 and 443:443 ports need to be exposed to the host machine then you will forward those ports on your router. This will allow your reverse proxy to communicate with Lets Encrypt generating and verifying your SSL certificates.

      • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        Seconding this, it is very convenient if your router supports a good provider. But it is better imo to use a good provider with a helper script on your server than to stick with your router defaults if they’re not that good.

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    As others have said, you can use dynamic DNS, but you also might have an IPv6 address that doesn’t change. Or maybe it does, you’ll have to check with your ISP. But that one can be set up as an AAAA record in your DNS.

    Most ISPs support IPv6, but some don’t, so you might not be accessible to everyone without also having an A record.

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I recommend afraid.org, you get everything that you need for free dynamic dns, and they’re a cool project so someday you may like to do even more with them or send them a little donation.

      I started with noip first, and the monthly re-up was so annoying.

  • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Whether your ip changes frequently depends on your ISP, but it’s not necessary to have a static ip. My public IP changes about once a year, but I use my router to update my dns and make ally external services rely on DNS and not IP to connect.

    You can also do this, look up “dynamic DNS”. You just need to register a DNS name (can be free) and set up the updates to make it accurate.

  • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    You only need a static address for hosting email or VoIP.

    You can do just about everything else with DDNS (dynamic DNS). However with DDNS, you will have downtime until the DDNS update takes effect and propagates to clients. This can be seconds… or hours. Depends on the DDNS service and TTLs that they set and how quickly your script/DDNS client works to push the update out.

    You should check how often your address changes and check how quickly your DDNS solution pushed the update out. If it’s 10 seconds every 10 months, you will likely find that perfectly acceptable. If it’s an hour every other sunday… maybe not. But only you will know how much downtime you can tolerate.

    I always will take static IP personally. But it’s not technically required and you can work around it if you want to save the 10-15$/month.

    • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.comEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I run an smtp relay exactly for that kind of stuff with emails. Clients still like wordpress and this is easy to use, many other will accept an smtp relay/service like say gmail (the first one I could think of)

        • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.comEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          chance you take with pretty much everything you don’t control. I do use as much as I can to protect emails (not that much really)

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
            0·
            10 days ago

            Well yes… but if you’re goal to self-host is to control your data, it’s a bit counter productive to use those relays services that inject that problem right back into your setup again.

            Edit: I’m not necessarily arguing… just putting the information out there that the services exist, but might not be a good fit.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      You only need a static address for hosting email or VoIP.

      Email works fine with non-static IP addresses. I suspect VoIP does too.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        “works fine” as in you can pretend it works, but you will get filtered by any larger email provider.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        No it does not. You need an active PTR record for email to work for most of the major carriers (Gmail, O365, etc…). Many providers will just outright block consumer IP ranges as well.

        You cannot host an email server on dynamic addresses.

        Edit: And you’ve edited in the VoIP part of your comment… Same thing there, you need PTR and such for those services to work well… Which generally can’t be assigned to dynamic addresses.

        • kevincox@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          Reverse DNS is different than static IP.

          But yes for outbound email, if you can’t control reverse DNS you will have pain. (Inbound is totally fine) You can in theory just use whatever hostname the ISP’s reverse DNS resolves to however you will get some spam score (or be rejected) as it doesn’t match your “from” domain.

          Outbound email is a huge pain really no matter what. Unless you have a long-term lease on the IP and it isn’t in a bad network you really have to pay someone else if you want reliable delivery.

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
            0·
            10 days ago

            You can’t assign a PTR record without a static address though. No ISP will do PTR that follows DHCP updates. I haven’t had issues with my leased IPs from my ISP (Through Centurylink). Though a year back I moved and haven’t been able to get a leased IP from my new provider… I have to relay my emails now through a service, that has been a pain in the ass. But now we head into anecdotal nonsense.

            And yes, we’re talking about hosting services. We’re in Selfhosted… and the OP is talking about publishing their ghost website… a webserver.

            But no, email is otherwise not an issue. I’ve been selfhosting a couple of personal domains for over a decade without issue. I also host several email services for work… no issues outside of some of our clients who want us to use their SMTP servers which apparently suck. But not my issue if their IT fails at managing it.

            Edit: DHCP -> PTR auto follow is a thing that exists though… which just makes it sad that ISPs don’t support it. I literally have hostname updates available and used inside of my own network. Just another sad day when pro-sumers are able to implement RFCs (RFC 2136, opnsense pushes updates to my internal DNS servers) better than ISPs.

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
            0·
            10 days ago

            PTR lookups has been a thing for email servers for a very long time… “used to work fine” would have been early 2000’s as far as I can remember.

            PTR is de facto requirement for over 20 years now. So unless you’re talking about pre-turn of the century, not really… email servers haven’t worked without PTRs for a very long time.

            I had to look it up, but Yahoo and AOL implemented PTR checks in 2003-2004. Gmail had it out of the box in 2004.

            Can you run a server without it? Yes… and it will work with any other server that doesn’t mandate valid PTR records. But no major consumer email server has supported receiving mail from a PTR-less server for 20+ years now. So you’re not going to be able to email basically anyone from your server.

  • iii@mander.xyzEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    It makes things easier, but you have options, such as:

    1. dynamic dns.
    2. Public reverse proxy or tunnel.
    3. Onion routing.
  • cantankerous_cashew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Surprised nobody has mentioned cloudflare ddns. If you registered your domain with cloudflare, you can use the api or qdm12’s (author of gluetun) ddns-updater to keep your A/AAAA records up to date.

  • darkan15@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    As others have already commented, what you need is a Dynamic DNS service, where you register a subdomain, and setup a small program or script on your computer that pings the DDNS server every few minutes, that way you leave that running on the background, and if the program detects that the IP with the request changes, it will update the subdomain to point to it automatically.

    You could access the blog from the subdomain of the DDNS directly or if you get your own domain, you can point it to the DDNS.

    If you want a recommendation, I have been using DuckDNS for years, and it has been pretty reliable.

    • mbirth@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      There’s also FreeDNS. Their only ask is that you log into the account once every 6 months so they know you’re still using it.

  • SheeEttin@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    You could also put it on a cloud system and not worry about your local connection.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    How are you hosting? And do you have a domain? Lot’s of good advice here, but knowing if you’re running on a Pi, in Docker, etc, would help others give you the easiest/best method.

    In short, you do not need a static IP.

    • Paddy66@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      Hi, I’m using Docker - one container for Ghost and one for Nginx Proxy Manager.

      I’ve decided to go with DDNS but am having trouble choosing a reliable free provider. I’ve seen Dynu.com recommended but that is not available in the dropdown list of servers in my router’s section on DDNS. Is that relevant?

      Or would I just ignore the router settings and set it up some other way?

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        Cloudflare is a good choice. I used DNSExit for a while, and also NS1, but settled on Cloudflare. You don’t have to use their proxying, just DNS.

        Here’s a Docker Compose for you that will set myhost.mydomain.com to point to your public IP of wherever it is run:

        dyndns-cloudflare:
    image: oznu/cloudflare-ddns
    container_name: dyndns-cloudflare
    environment:
      - API_KEY=<key>
      - ZONE=mydomain.com
      - SUBDOMAIN=myhost
      - PROXIED=false
    restart: unless-stopped
      • RecitalMatchbox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        I’m having a good experience with cloudflare, using ddclient on a cron job

        To clarify: it doesn’t matter much what your router supports if you have a server with ddclient (possibly in Docker container). Then you can choose whatever provider you’d like, and there are tons of resources on ddclient.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    You can rent a virtual private server (VPS). I used to have a number of these for under $10 / month. I imagine they might cost more now., but chances are you can still find something super affordable.

    Wordpress.org will let you have a free site but you don’t get a custom domain. Wordpress.com has a personal plan for $4 / month. Matt Mullenweg (CEO) has revealed himself to be a crazy piece of shit, so maybe look elsewhere. I’m just trying to give you a sense of how accessible this stuff can be.

    Running a VPS will require more learning, but it can be super gratifying if you enjoy nerdy computer stuff and solving puzzles just for self-satisfaction. I used to use Rackspace, Linode, and something else that I can’t recall at the moment. All were pretty reasonable. Rackspace had a ton of good setup guides for newbies that were well written. I’d occasionally land on those doing a web search for other hosting stuff and found them reliable.

  • K3CAN@lemmy.radioEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    I selfhost my blog without a static IP. You just need Dynamic DNS.

    Keep in mind that your outbound bandwidth might be different from your inbound. I get 300mbps in, but only 5mbps out. It’s not noticeable during normal Internet use, but as you start sharing content publicly, limited bandwidth becomes really noticeable.

  • Prunebutt@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    I could make this quick: Is your internet access behind a NAT? If yes: you’re gonna need a static IP.

      • Paddy66@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        I was going to use Cloudflare to sort this, but I’m uncomfortable how big they are getting / lack of competition in that part of the market. So we looked at Pangolin as an alternative, but it’s a faff to self host.

        Hence why we’re back at exposing it straight out the back of Nginx Proxy Manager.

      • Prunebutt@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        But how will a tailnet help for a blog? At some point, the https port needs to be open.

    • Paddy66@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      My router says it has NAT enabled (in the WAN settings section - for the internet connection)

        • iii@mander.xyzEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          Static IP is helpfull but not necessary. Even with NAT and a changeing IP there’s options, such as:

          1. dynamic dns.
          2. Public reverse proxy or tunnel.
          3. Onion routing.
          • Prunebutt@slrpnk.netEnglish
            0·
            10 days ago
            1. How do you open the https port behind a nas?
            2. That public tunnel needs at least a public IP address again.
            3. Ok, forgot that one. But then you’re only accessible through Tor, isn’t it?