I called my ISP today to set up a static IP because my services keep being taken down from my IP changing. I either need a business plan or a 5-10gbps residential plan to do that...

I cannot get on the business plan without a valid Business ID so that's not an option. And no way in hell I'm paying for those speeds.

Anyone have any alternatives to stop this from happening so often? My public IP seems to change regularly every 2-3 weeks and it's getting pretty frustrating having to reconfigure things. I only have 2 ISPs in my area and they are both terrible. I assume I'm out of luck, but maybe there's some tech magic I'm unaware of.

I think the default solution for this is to use a dynamic dns. There are services for that or you can get yourself a domain and configure that as dnydns in your router. That is what I am doing atleast

https://www.howtogeek.com/866573/what-is-dynamic-dns-ddns-and-how-do-you-set-it-up/

I use ddclient with cloudflare as my domains nameserver.

Never had a static ip, but I've never had an issue with it changing because I've always used this.

If you have a domain on cloudflare you can make it point to your public ip using something like this https://github.com/timothymiller/cloudflare-ddns

Also some routers, like tp-link, have a ddns feature where they provide you a domain that points to your public ip

I use tailscale instead of caring about my public IP or dynamic DNS

It's been very long since I've had to mess with this, I don't even know which machine it runs on. But somewhere, I have a Cron job that runs a curl to namecheap with a magic string. That magic string confirms I am the owner of that domain and namecheap will automatically update the IP address for that URL to whatever IP address my curl came from.

I pay $5/mo for a VPS and host Nginx Proxy Manager on it

DDNS is the way. Or was, until Tailscale.

Ok great, this sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. Have seen the term DDNS used before but didn't know it was for this. Thanks!

Most ISPs charge insane fees for static IPs (like 4-5x the monthly rate of dynamic IP accounts), so while this is an option, it’s a relatively expensive one.

Prior to me having my static IP I used duckDNS and a cron script on a pi. My ISP offers two free static IPs so I got those now. Sorry to hear you don’t even have one.

Most ISPs charge insane fees for static IPs

The joy of living in the US I guess. My ISP in Australia charges $5 a month for a static IPV4 address.

I have a VPS running nginx and wireguard. I just forward whatever subdomains to my home server over wireguard.

Same with mine though I don't bother because my dynamic IP hasn't changed in 6 years anyway

100% recommend tailscale. I have it set up so that IPs from three different data centers for work and my home are all routed properly, so I never have to do anything special to connect to anything. It’s like super simple and amazing.

I solved it with a cheap VPS running Caddy as a reverse proxy and a Tailscale connection back to my home server.

I think Tailscale has a service called Tailscale Serve which may work around a frequently changing ip as well. Not sure though as I haven't looked into it much.

It's not worth it unless you're trying to run something like an email server or a name server. Most things work just fine with dynamic DNS. A few minutes of downtime on a personal site when the IP address changes is not a big deal.

Thats crazy that you now need to prove you have a business to get that service? Don't worry, it cost way more anyway and offers very little extra to be worth it at least in the US. I used to use duckdns years ago, and now I just said screw it and purchased a domain name from namecheap for a few bucks for the year and a few more bucks for the ssl cert then use the ddns service through them and link it to a pc on my network using the small app they provide to keep the IP updated. I use the name for all my services. Sometimes the name will cost way more when renewing in which case ill just pick another one because screw them. Ive used a .co and now using a .space.

https://www.duckdns.org/

Duck it!

Man. At least one isp in my area gives you the business plan if you just ask for it. I mean you need to give a business name but you can make it anything you like.

Depending a bit on OPs needs, this is the quickest & easiest fix I know of.

Why not run just the VPN on the VPS instead of opening everything directly?

Wouldn't your bandwidth then be restricted to the bandwidth of VPS?
How much bandwidth does a 5$ VPS give?

Not sure I understand. The VPN (Tailscale) is on the VPS.

I have several very technically challenged family members that wanted to use a couple of the services that I host. Doing it this way simplifies the setup and the tech support calls. The VPS, or rather a domain name that leads to the VPS, is how they access those services.

I have Tailscale setup on all my personal devices, so I generally just connect directly to the services.

This is what I use. Been flawless for 2 years.

Right, sole proprietorships are generally seen as valid businesses.

TheKaul dba TheKaul Consulting Services and a business id of your SSN will usually do the trick

OP, with that said - My IP almost never changes, but, pfSense has the ability to update DNS records when it changes, depending on the DNS Host. No reason a script wouldn't be able to do the same thing when it sees your IP change, assuming the things you have to change basically come down to setting a couple of records to match your home IP anyways.

Vultr allows up to 1TB/mo of bandwidth for $5/mo. Plenty for what I use it for

Still kinda is. Some devices might not be able to connect to your tailnet. You might be trying to reach your devices from a device that isn't on your VPN. The funnel might work, if you can work within its limitations.

Have had this setup running for at least 5 years, works flawlessly, and running it in a docker container meant all I had to when moving to a new homeserver was copy the config file

I run pfsense with dyndns and a short TTL. It updates my DNS provider instantly when the gateway IP changes. For mail I got a cheap vps running pfsense again, tunneling back home via Wireguard and haproxy to link up connections. It is very stable and not as hard to set up as it sounds (and cheap).

Last time I had to do something like that I used no-ip running on my raspberry pi that's already running pihole

If your domain registrar doesn't do DDNS, and you don't want to pay extra for one that does, you can get free DNS for life at Hurricane Electric:

https://dns.he.net/

All you need to do is finish their little online IPv6 course. TBH the "course" is just setting up your own server properly and proving it.

Either use a dynamic DNS service, as many others have mentioned and probably easiest, or, assuming you only want yourself to have access to the services, another option is to use something like Tailscale or a WireGuard/FRP instance in a static VPS as the rendezvous point.

I was flat out rejected by my ISP to have a static IP, though I only had it changed once since I started hosting services, so ahatever.

Not in the US, at work we pay 6 times the rate I pay at home for 1/6 the speed I get at home, everyone hates our office internet speed 😂, at least it's static do we can host stuff

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If you don't go with tailscale or dyndns/duckdns and decide to just pay for the upgraded service from the ISP, I recommend going with the 5-10gbps option. When I checked a few years ago the base level business plans were the same price as the 5-10gbps plans but you only got 250mbps. (Comcast & att)

Do you need to publicly expose your services?

I personally use a VPS with Wireguard

The joy of having a crown corp in a province of Canada providing real competition gives me 2 free static IPs.

This is the way

Nice! Although I do wish everyone would get with IPV6 at some stage. But it seems everyone is OK with the current coping mechanisms in IPV4, so maybe I should pin my hopes on IPV7 or 8.

I really love the vibe of freedns.afraid.org

They also give you 6 months in between needing to log in to your account

Duckdns.org and then set up a cron to update it regularly

It's one of the features I love about Njalla for domains the most.

You don't even need a ddns service because they support updating through simple https calls.

So I have a super tiny script that basically checks the WAN IP through ipify, then checks that against the routers current WAN IP, and if they match it does nothing and ends, but if its different, it sends out a curl with the new IP. I have it running every few minutes in a cronjob. It's actually technically my service with the most uptime according to healthchecks.io.

I use duckdns.org and then make use of CNAME records pointed at the duckdns record for my own domain name/subdomains.

My router (unifi device) keeps duck DNS up to date with my changing IP, but there's lots of ways to get that done.

You could consider tailnet or similar as well?

Ddns as others said or use cloudflare dns with cloudflare tunnel

Proxy through a VPS, or use dynamic DNS if you don't mind occasionally waiting for TTL expiration when your address suddenly changes. You can set it to 1 minute and that often works these days (it didn't always).

Will your ISP give you a static IPv6 block? It's v4 that's scarce, but if it's just for your own stuff and you aren't worried about users on old v4-only networks, it's fine to just use pure v6.

If you want a super cheap VPS with static ipv6 and NAT v4, try tierhive.com.

That is a bit crazy if you are in the US. There is no ‘business Id’ just say you are a sole proprietorship, meaning the business is just you, no corporation structure or anything like that and you are dba, doing business as, and your name.

That is how you technically describe yourself when you are a business when you are a person.

Your tax id number would just be your social security number.

It’s legal to transact business as a person.

Since nobody mentioned, I recommend https://desec.io/ as the DNS provider. Has a good REST API to update records, also provides a dedyn.io dynamic domain, and runs as a nonprofit. I think ddclient will also support it natively in the next release as well.

The solution of renting a VPS also works but usually incurs some cost. You might also want to look into Cloudflare Tunnels

Bruh mate.
Mine changes daily so stop complaining that hard xD

Honest suggestion: Just set up a dyndns with any dns provider that supports automations.

Well that's some good info to have in general. Think I'm okay with using DDNS but this is good to know.