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Comment by wrycoder | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I missed it, but I don't see anything about discoverability.

That's a big problem for servers on residential IP ranges.

Discoverability? Uh... I think you may be dragging commercial concepts into this that don't have a place here. For a personal website people discover it when you link them to it. Or discover it 4 years later after google has indexed it and it happens organically. But you don't ever have to care about "discoverability". You're not trying to get a bunch of hits, or profit, or whatever.

A personal website is something you do for fun. If this personal website is serving as your resume to get hired or sell stuff, it's not a personal website. It's more commercial/profit crap. At that point, yeah, use all the cargo cult you want. Business want to see the tools and technologies they use demonstrated.

I've been hosting superkuh.com from my home PC for 20 years. When my IP changes (maybe once per year) I just log into my registrar when I notice it (it's okay if I don't notice for a day or two, no big deal) and update it.

Self-hosting means hosting things yourself. If you don't know what you host that's a problem. Otherwise, discovery is largely irrelevant and residential IPs have no bearing on it.

For actual reachability, a lot of people use VPNs, network meshes (Tailscale, ZeroTier, Nebula, etc) or secure proxies (Cloudflare Argo Tunnels).

You can also self-host software on VPSs or cloud servers.

I have a small script ran by cron (well, systemd timers) every 15 minutes which checks the current IP via https://api.ipify.org/ and updates dns entries on digital ocean (its dns service is free) if it differs from what's there.

If someone has to deal with dynamic IP addresses and wants to use dynamic DNS as well, there's also the pretty nice ddclient package: https://ddclient.net/

I've been using it with NameCheap pretty successfully for a while now, here's an example of some of the integrations it supports: https://ddclient.net/protocols.html (sadly no DigitalOcean integration as of yet, but this might be of use to others)

I'd also like to learn more about about this subject. Cloudflare offers some API to update DNS: https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/how...

I'd like to see some of those scripts that use CF API to detect and update IP in dynamics public IP environment.

It’s not particularly pretty, but here is my home-grown script for doing exactly that. It coordinates between Cloudflare DNS, my Unifi Security Gateway, and haproxy running on my home servers to keep my IPv4 and IPv6 addresses up to date everywhere.

https://gist.github.com/thedanbob/df4cc49aa3e60581e010f443ac...

I used to use Cloudflare's API to do this, but then we changed ISPs and now are behind CGNAT, so we don't even have a public IP. To publicly expose my web server, I created a Cloudflared tunnel, and have our DNS (which is also hosted at Cloudfare) point to the tunnel. It works quite well, and adds some security because we're no longer visible to attackers using IP address scans.

If you have a server with a public address, a machine with a private address can simply use e.g. curl to access some (even non-existant) url on the server periodically which can then be extracted from the logs by a script on the server.

I actually use this to announce my internal address, even without a web server, just by accessing a locked port on the server, where the firewall logs this access.

This is one of the challenges I have faced with russing servers on local IPs.

Do you have any resources you can share about this subject?

https://freemyip.com/ is a good tool when on residential network with no static ip from ISP.

Or you can rent a vps for $5 per month and wireguard your internal services to the vps. Vps gets put in the DNS records and throw traefik or caddy on the vps to handle things

Some HN user months ago suggested the entry level VPS offer from ionos.com which is $2/month at the moment. I bookmarked the link because I will probably need it when I relocate, but never used them so far. Any comments from customers are welcome.

https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps#plans

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