Hey everyone. This is probably a super noob question, but I’m very much just an amateur when it comes to self-hosting.

I host several services that I access locally through 192.whatever:####, and when I occasionally need remote access, I use Tailscale and access through 100.whatever: ####. The duplicate bookmarks is mildly annoying though.

Can I just buy a personal domain, and have all my services be coolname.com:#### for both local and Tailscale access? Is that as simple a process as I want it to be?

Edit: I appreciate all the comments and I’ll probably just use Tailacale’s MagicDNS for simplicity, but one or my (unwritten, my bad) goals was to have one URL that works locally and remotely, regardless of Tailscale. I don’t leave Tailscale constantly connected because it overheats my phone (which already has terrible battery life).

  • soratoyuki@piefed.zipOPEnglish
    1·
    3 hours ago

    So I was doing this from the (emulated?) terminal on my Android phone, and dig just returned command not found. I just got off work and moved to my desktop running Fedora, and on my desktop MagicDNS addresses work. Which I guess narrows things down.

    On my desktop, dig returns

     ; <<>> DiG 9.18.51-dev <<>> toshokun  
 # ;; global options: +cmd  
 ;; Got answer:  
 ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 6364  
 ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1  
 
 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:  
 ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 65494  
 ;; QUESTION SECTION:  
 ;toshokun.                      IN      A  
 
 ;; Query time: 3960 msec  
 ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.53#53(127.0.0.53) (UDP)  
 ;; WHEN: Sat Nov 14 15:46:41 EST 2026  
 ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 37

    My resolv.conf is pretty similar. The namesever I’m pretty sure is correct for systemd reasons.

     nameserver 127.0.0.53  
 options edns0 trust-ad  
 search tail######.ts.net

    I appreciate the help, but realistically the answer to “Is that as simple a process as I want it to be?” is no, not quite, at least at my knowledge level lol. I’ll do more documentation reading in the meantime.

    • FedX@quokk.auEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Interesting. Does trying to simply ping myhost or myhost.xxx.ts.net work?

      • soratoyuki@piefed.zipOPEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        On Android (well, GrapheneOS) both return temporary failure in name resolution.

        Pinging the Tailscale IP (the 100. one) returns 100% packet loss even though opening 100.whatever:#### works in a browser.

        • FedX@quokk.auEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Ok, I think I am beginning to understand the issue. Can you try resolving the domain in your browser? If it’s a Firefox derivative, you can go to about:networking, and it gives you the ability to resolve a domain in the browser. Some Chrome based ones should have similar features, but YMMV.