Hello everyone. I’m at a crossroad here. For my project in production, I’m not sure if I should purchase a static IP address from my ISP, which means I would have to have a commercial account or if I should use a VPN.
Either way I’m self-hosting, and I feel like a VPN would be more efficient, but I’m not sure. I’m confused on what to do here for my website
Any feedback or suggestions is welcomed. Thank you
Have you looked into a dynamic dns solution? There are a lot of different free options out there, but it lets you have a system to automatically update the DNS records when your public IP address changes. I have run similar things on my home network in the past and was happy with it.
+1 – I’m serving several sites from my home network connection with a dynamic IP address. I think it has changed twice in three years.
Using Cloudflare for DNS and CDN (free tier in both cases), and PFSense (free software) as a router. PFSense and most other routers can update DNS records in Cloudflare and other DNS providers automatically.
Obviously this is an “after the fact” solution, so there will be unavailability in the time between the IP changing and PFSense detecting the change and updating the records in Cloudflare. Depending on your workload, Cloudflare can be configured to serve from its cache in the case of origin unavailability.
If you need total reliability then arranging for a static IP seems like the way to go.
ps, hey Damian 