4 reasons to use dynamic DNS for remote access

Running your own services at home is a great way to level up your game, adding anything from your own private cloud, NAS, media or game servers, or smart home functionality. But if you want to access those services externally, you might find that your ISP rotates your external IP address regularly, causing your services to break constantly. This is where DDNS can come in, and here are our four top reasons to set up DDNS in your home.

4 Your services will have a consistent address

No more random breakages

The most significant benefit of DDNS is the problem it’s designed to solve. DDNS prevents random DNS breakages for your services, ensuring you can always access your home services reliably, even if your IP changes, and without needing to pay extra to your ISP for a static IP.

Much like DHCP internally on your network, ISPs use a dynamic IP allocation to provide external IPs to their users, and several users may share one IP. Depending on your ISP, some can be more stable than others (I’ve had my current static IP for months), but things like frequent power cuts or downtime on your router or modem can make this more likely. For some ISPs, your IP can change almost weekly, making it a nightmare to keep on top of updating DNS settings for your external services.

That’s where DDNS comes in. DDNS is a widely supported method of dynamically updating your DNS configuration to reflect your new IP address. So there are no more manual updates. A little bit of software running on your network will regularly ping your DNS server and update the IP address if necessary.

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3 It’s cheaper than a static IP

No need to hand your ISP more money

One of the best things about DDNS is that it’s effectively free to set up. Plenty of free DDNS providers like no-ip.org use natively supported DDNS configurations on things like your router to keep a hostname up to date. These often rely on you using a subdomain of their domain. The beauty of DDNS is that once you’ve got a single domain setup, you can use CNAMEs (effectively a URL to URL alias in DNS) to point more and more domains to the same IP. If you correctly use a host proxy like NGINX to direct traffic based on the original domain, you can have multiple services running on the same IP.

This is a useful setup if you want to run multiple external services at home, and it even gives you the option of centralizing your authentication on your proxy server — though that’s a little out of scope here.

2 DNS helps keep things simple

Having consistent domains is a huge upgrade over memorizing IPs

Using domain names to access services internally and externally is one of the best upgrades you can make for your network as a homelabber or tinkerer. Once you’ve got a couple of services running and their supporting tools, like a suite for your media server or some home automation tooling, you’ll quickly find yourself with quite a problem remembering IPs. Setting up a home DNS server can resolve this, but it won’t work externally, and that’s where DDNS can come in.

DDNS isn’t a total replacement for using external DNS to access your network, but as the first point in this list demonstrates, it’s what makes it viable. It also helps add another layer of simplicity to your network, meaning you can migrate to a No-IP setup externally and internally. This is handy if you have many configuration files or services that point to your external IPs, as one change could break multiple services.

1 DDNS works with everything

Build in flexibility for everything from your NAS to game servers

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One of the most significant benefits of DDNS is that once it’s set up, it works with everything. Whether you’re hosting game servers for your friends, accessing a smart home or Internet of Things device, or trying to connect to a remote desktop setup in your home, DDNS will support it. This isn’t a benefit to be scoffed at, as many other protocols designed to mitigate similar issues are notorious for reliability. DDNS is also far simpler than alternatives like setting up a home VPN, which relies on each device external to your network being able to connect to it and (depending on which VPN you use) can also rely on you having a static IP to start with — chicken or egg?

Now, there are some great alternatives to DDNS that are arguably a better solution for most people, like setting up a home VPN with Tailscale, but this relies on each device you’re using being able to run the Tailscale client, which is unlikely to be the case for a lot of network or smart home devices. DDNS provides network-wide access and offers a single entry point for traffic management.

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DDNS is useful if you’ve got a regularly changing IP

If changing your home IP is a problem, then DDNS is an excellent solution. Others exist, like setting up an external VPN in the cloud using something like Tailscale or buying a static IP from your ISP, but these can easily cost you money. DDNS is free, relatively easy to set up, and battle-tested over the years to provide a stable and reliable service. If your router doesn’t support DDNS, setting up an application on your primary gaming PC, work laptop, or home server is easy enough, and it’ll run on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi as well.