But there are the odd few, say, those who wish to run a web/ftp/ssh/any other server from home. It is all well and good telling everyone to look at your brilliant new site at 90.80.70.60, but then boom. Your router freezes due to all the traffic and you have to restart, 5 minutes later everything is up and running again but this time your brilliant new site has a brilliant new address of 90.80.70.40, uh-oh, now you have heaps of disgruntled visitors lost in the maze of the web, bit of a pain isn’t it? Don’t think Google would be where it is today id it’s address changed every 5 minutes.

This is where Dynamic DNS providers, such as DynDNS come in. They allow you to setup a domain which points to your IP, and automagically updates when it changes, pretty useful. The only problem is that unless you cough up some cash you are limited to a subdomain of one of their 78 domains, still useful, but we can do better. Now, you could take the seemingly easy option of handing some money over to them for the privilege of using their name servers to direct your IP, or you can do a small modification to the DNS records of your current domain for almost identical effect. For the purpose of this I’m going to assume you have already got your free sub-domain setup with DynDNS, and just want your domain pointing to it.

Here’s how in 4 simple steps:

1. Login to your Hosting/Domain/DNS Control panel (i.e. the place where you manage your domain).
2. You need to go to a page named Manage DNS, or Custom DNS, or something similar, from here you’ll get a list of records related to the domain in question.
3. You need to either add or edit a record, the new record should be of the type CNAME, and the value/content should be “yourdyndnsaddress.dyndns.org.” (replace as appropriate). Ensure that you keep the dot (.) at the end, otherwise stuff might not work as it should.
4. Thats it, you may have to wait a while for the updates to propagate, but you should soon be able to access your dynamically changing home IP address from a nice custom URL, and best of all you won’t ever need to update it again!

Now, for the drawback. Because of the type of DNS Record I wouldn’t recommend this on a traffic-heavy site, since to get to your site your computer has to do 2 DNS lookups, rather than one (first to see where your domain points to, then second to see which IP your DynDNS account is linked to). After-all, if you’re running a traffic-heavy site from your own server on a Dynamic IP, maybe it’s time to invest in a Static IP? For most people wanting to do this it won’t be a problem though, and this small drawback is negligible considering for most people it isn’t worth spending a great deal just for a domain which you feel looks better.

So, uses for this? Well, anything that requires for you to know your home IP really, here are some examples:

• Running your own web server, with freelance work I often develop sites on my MacBook, and then provide clients with the relevant links to see the project, having a constantly-changing IP can be a pain as links often change, leading to those ghastly “Server Not Found” errors, using DynDNS gets rid of this problem, but then going one step further and using a custom domain makes everything look more professional.
• VNC, lets you control your computer remotely without having to use any 3rd party software, having your own domain makes remembering the address even simpler.

As mentioned before, there are a lot more, you could even use this principle to create your own web host, simply repeating the steps for all the domains you want hosting (And configuring your web server appropriately).

Can you think of any more uses, or any potential problems with this? Let me know.