Dynamic Hosting - How To Host Your Own Website Without Paying Your ISP's Ransom For A Static IP Address

ISP Extortion - Pay Your Internet Lord For Access

Feeling like a 13th century serf when it comes to the rules and fees your ISP puts on you when it comes to hosting your own wondeful, internet goodness like websites, a personal cloud, or even a media server? You're not alone. It would seem that finding a reliable, free, and easy-to-setup means of communicating with your home server belongs in the realm of wizardry and dragons, but there are options. (Click here to skip straight to your options)

$20 A Month For A Static IP Address - You're Kidding Right?

On a funny note, check out this video...it captures the true spirit of an ISP to the 'T':

 So I recently switch from AT&T's DSL 6mbps down/700kbps up(which, btw has the world's worst customer service...I'm not proud of it, but told the latest chat attendant to throw himself out of the nearest window) to my local cable company's 30mbps down/10mbps up high speed internet. AT&T's garbage cost $65/month with a static IP, and Dish was around the same price, so when I switched my tv/phone/internet to my local cable company, I thought it was going to be about the same price. Then I what the price was to add a static IP address...$20 friggin bucks a month...A month? Are they sure they didn't mean a year??? Well, long story short, I wasn't going to pay a small fortune to have them spend 5 seconds to change a setting on their end so I could setup my router with a static IP address.  Therest began my search for alternative options.

Option #1: Quick, Free, Fairly Easy - Just Not So Clean - Dynamic DNS

I'd heard a while about dynamic DNS for a while, but had never really given it a try.  For those of you that don't know what DNS (Domain Name Server) servers do, they're basically a giant translation table that changes your IP address to an alphanumeric name and back again.  So when you go to the internet, and type google.com into your address bar, your browser goes to your DNS server and asks what's google.com's IP address.  The DNS server gives you the IP address and presto, your swimming in googly goodness. DNS server's communicate with each other to tell people on the internet where something is located.  Typically, this would be the static IP address tied to your router. We just don't have a static IP address, because we're not all of us are Donald Trump and can just throw away $240/year on absolutely nothing. Enter Dynamic DNS.

Dynamic DNS basically updates the external DNS servers with your ever changing (that really doesn't change all that often) dynamic IP address.  Many offer a limited number of free hosts, like noip.com. It's the perfect solution if you're looking to access your home files from anywhere with your own cloud server, maybe run a media server, home automation, etc. What it's not perfect for it hosting websites. 

The concept is simple when it comes to dynamic dns websites, it's just dirty. Let's say you own www.joeblow.com.

1. When you registered joeblow.com at a site like godaddy.com, you redirect it to a site like noip.com which provides you with a free subdomain to forward it to. It would look something like "joeblow.noip.us" or "joeblow.zapto.org".
2. Noip.com provides a little, lightweight program that runs in the background on your computer that will grab your public IP address every 5 minutes or so. From there, it updates your account at noip.com, and tells their DNS servers what IP address to send joeblow.noip.us to (the dynamic IP address of your router). 
3. The dirty part, instead of your website reading joeblow.com in the address bar, it reads joeblow.noip.us. The fact that it isn't the website address the user was suspecting could cause them to tread carefully on your site - especially if they are interested in purchasing something. Web redirects have always been popular attack methods used by hackers. 

Let's say someone wants to buy a brewery business plan. Having some funky web name show up in the address bar like brewerybusinessplan.zapto.org is a tough pill to swallow if you're asking someone to purchase something from you. 

Noip.com offers a premium membership for $19.95/year that allows port 80 redirecting. Couple that with the ability to mask/cloak a URL, and I thought I was golden. Turns out it's a lot more work than simply changing the name of the site.  For each page you want to have just your website name, you have to also enter the pages title, the meta keywords, and the meta description.  Well...that sucks, so I didn't do it.

Option 2: Point Your Domain's 'A' Record At Your IP

Another dirty option is to simply update the DNS zone record with your domain registrar to have them point the 'a' record at your IP.  If you don't know your IP address, or want to see if it's changed because it's dynamic, you can go here: checkip.dyndns.org - but there's still an issue.

Since our IP address is DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), it means anytime our router is restarted or possibly when our computer is restared, our ISP could assign us a new IP address.  The question then becomes, how do we make sure our IP address is kept as up to date as possible?

And so, my quest continues in part 2 of this article: How to run a website without a subdomain via dynamic dns or a static IP address.