Most internet service providers (ISPs) give residential customers a dynamic IP address. They pull from a pool of IP addresses and allocate one to a home. Since the IP address might change in a few months or even in a few hours, it can be hard to consistently access your personal computer when you’re away from home.

Setting up a dynamic DNS (DDNS) service gives you reliable access to self-hosted services, like a personal website, a Minecraft server, or just your home computer. If you point a hostname to your home network, you can have Kubernetes update the DNS record when your IP inevitably changes.

What is Dynamic DNS?

Since most residential customers have dynamic IPs, there’s a few options to manage a changing IP address.

• Static IP: if your ISP offers this option, get a dedicated IP address so it never changes
• Router: if your router has a dynamic DNS option, configure DDNS on your router to always maintain an active connection
• DDNS services: Cloudflare recommends a few options, such as updating your IP using a dynamic DNS client application

Making sure your IP is up to date, or remains fixed, guarantees reliable access to your self-hosted services.

Don’t gamble on accessing your self-hosted services when you’re away from home

For example, I have a self-hosted Minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi at home. I want to set up DDNS so that I can access this game server even if the IP changes while I’m out of town.

#raspberry-pi #dns #docker #kubernetes