Thursday, April 13, 2006

No-IP

How can you reliably serve anything to the internet without a static IP address. You can't, right? Wrong.

I was trying to find a way to use my dhcp powered residential internet connection to run an an ftp server or any other kind of server for that matter. I spoke to my provider and was informed that I would have to pay an extra $20 per month for a static IP. This pretty much doubles the cost of the connection. Now why would I do a thing like that? I wouldn't but luckily for me I did a little research before I gave up on the idea.

I found that there are a number of services that allow you to forward a domain name of your choice to any IP you like. They even provide a utility that will keep your IP up to date when your ISP forcibly re-provisions you. I think that's very cool indeed and what's more, if you use No-IP.com it's free. Even if you, by some chance, have a static IP it's still a very useful, and free, service. Oh yeah and the auto-update software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.

I am in no way affiliated with No-IP.com I just think they are cool.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use http://zoneedit.com/ which is also free and is supported by many free software auto-update clients like ddclient.

Anonymous said...

There's also dyndns.org, which, I think, is the original dynamic dns service provider. (ddclient was developed for them.)

charlieb said...

I was happy to find just one service. I had no idea that it was even fesable to do something like that.