I’ve been using Hetzner for some time, but now I want to host everything myself at home.

DNS was easy with Hetzner, just point the domain to Hetzner’s nameservers, and from there to my server.

How are people doing this for home servers? When there’s not access to something like Hetzner’s nameservers.

Is there a free/cheap nameserver I can use to point at my home server’s IP?

  • ScrubblesEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    Agree with the two so far, but to clarify how I use them.

    Cloudflare for external/public services. (Like if you run Lemmy). Use the tunnels so random people’s traffic aren’t hitting your actual IP at all, and it remains proxied through them.

    Dynamic DNS if you have an ISP that will change your IP on you randomly. Personally I use namecheap, and they have an API to update when the IP changes. I use pfsense which has a dynamic dns plugin which will update my IP if it changes.

    • @PeachMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      I thought CloudFlare tunnels handled the non-static IP part, so DDNS shouldn’t be necessary? I have a tunnel running on an RPi and I THINK it’s going to update the IP that CF has if/when my ISP changes it… I guess I’ll find out! 😆

      • ScrubblesEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        There might be a service in cloudflare that does that - but I’m not aware of it. DNS in cloudflare requires an IP to proxy to, and you would need something (hosted by cloudflare on your rpi theoretically) that then would notify cloudflare that your IP has changed - otherwise cloudflare won’t know where it’s proxying from.

        Cloudflare isn’t DNS, it’s a proxy that sits in the middle. (Okay it also does DNS, but I mean it’s not just routing traffic). Essentiall all cloudflare does is

        • User queries DNS for yourdomain.com
        • DNS returns cloudflare’s IP address
        • Cloudflare sees the request, and then asks your server’s IP address for the data
        • Once cloudflare receives the data from your server, it will pass it up to the user.

        I’m simplifying a lot but that’s the gist. But if your IP changes then cloudflare doesn’t know where to get your data.