It's been some time since I had some use for a dynamic DNS provider. Until a few years ago, I had a free account at dyndns.org which worked quite well to provide remote access to folks without a static IP.

Most of my clients are small or medium-size businesses, with a professional ISP and a static IP address which I can easily manage from the outside. But some of them have a "vanilla" ISP without a static IP address. I went over to dyndns.org to see if this solution was still working, but it looks like now they only support paying customers.

There seem to be quite a lot of free dynamic DNS providers around. Can you recommend any particular one, or issue any caveats?

Cheers,

Niki

If you are a D-link costumer and likes the dyndns service and knows the limitation of free account, you can register a free dyndns account at the following address: https://www.dlinkddns.com

Just for reference about this subject: http://boomshadow.net/tech/how-to-still-get-a-free-dyndns-account

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Out of curiosity, how often does the IP address change on the dhcp clients? My ISP rarely changes the address unless I change CPE mac address. Even then, I've ended up with the same address. I just bought a domain and set it up just like I had a static IP address. I have a script that checks my IP, and if it changes, emails me with the new address.

This is Natalie the marketing manager for No-IP. I just wanted to let you know that No-IP is a great free dynamic DNS option. We offer 3 free hostnames and our awesome free technical support. We have over 17 million users worldwide and pride ourselves in our network. Let me know if you have any questions or need help!

Natalie

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I can second what Natalie has said, I use No-IP for quite some time now for my home-server and it works without any problems, using the software they provide.

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I also use No-IP2 and I can only commend their service. A SlackBuild for noip2 is available from http://slackbuilds.org

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Recommendation: anydns.info. Small German provider with 100% uptime while I was using it. I am no longer able to use it because my ISP (Three Mobile Broadband) has started assigning private IP addresses to its customers. We are obviously behind some kind of NAT setup, which is totally frustrating for me.

Caveat: before I used anydns.info I paid a yearly subscription to dyndns.org. At some point I allowed the subscription to expire and within weeks I started receiving spam at the email address I had used exclusively for dyndns.org. Other people had the same problem.

on my home connection with Comcast
it would be steady for 6 months
but then in 1 or 2 days change 8 times
then be fine for 6 months
and repeat

a business / corporate connection should not change

In the past i used " no-ip.com "
the free service was fairly good


for 4 people to offer up "no-ip.com" and none of us are emploied by them
says something about no-ip

http://www.noip.com/support/knowledg...-what-do-i-do/
You would be better off using TwoDNS:

https://twodns.de/en/faqs#faq1
And TwoDNS has some neat features that make it the better service.

And no - I do not work for TwoDNS and I am not affiliated with them. I am just a happy user.

The 30 days of inactivity means only that the hostname will be deleted if the no-ip program doesn't contact the server, which would make dynamic DNS useless anyways. If you run the no-ip program this will never happen. At least it never happened for me and I am using No-IP for about 2 years now, IIRC.

No-ip will expire if the ISP doesn't change the IP address within 30 days (so no update happens).

But the days of dynamic DNS are over anyway. IPv4 address space is exhausted and end user ISPs switch over to DS Lite with CGNAT, so there is no global IPv4 address visible anymore.

That is why dyn.com (aka dyndns.org) is desperately trying to sell up to five years of "VIP accounts" to their "free" users: These services will become useless soon.

If I understand it correctly, that means that the IP address that an ISP assigns to a customer is just another private network address (RFC6598 Shared Address Space?), not a global IP address. There'll have to be another NAT layer between the ISP network and the global internet. Won't that make it impossible to host services on the double NATted systems?

Exactly that is the case. CGNAT was introduced many years ago on 2G/3G mobile networks using RFC1918 space from 10.0.0.0/8, but is increasingly used for cable and DSL customers. DynDNS is pointless in such scenarios.

take a look at freedns.afraid.org its great

I can confirm that no-ip requires web login every 30 days or the account will expire.
They are same as dyndns.
I recently opened an account with them and then set it up in my pfSense dyndns config but since my ip address doesn't change, it expired.

I've switched to a service from dnsexit.com.