I’ve been thinking about finally getting myself a proper domain for my server, but a friend told me that to get one I either need a VPS with a public ip (which just takes all the fun out of selfhosting) or purchase a static ip, which is beyond what I’m willing to spend for a hobby. Do I have any good options or should I just let it go?
Also, if this isn’t the correct community for this, I’d appreciate being pointed to the right one, thank you


You need static IP only if you want to host the autoritative DNS server for your domain (spoiler alert: you don’t).
You don’t need to proxy your traffic via VPS (higher latency for no good reason) and the dyndns providers are over priced.
What you need is:
That’s all… ddclient will update that single dns entry every time your server restarts (or the IP lease expires and you get a new IP)
The only thing you need to pay here is the domain (you can get free domains but that is another story and tbh I would not recommend, there are cheap domains out of there)
mhh I don’t think this works behind cgnat…
it works if you have a dynamic public ip. Where I’m from, generally, they give you a natted ip.
For sure, you need a public (dynamic) IP for this.
NAT sucks, been there, done that… ugh! And, yeah, nothing can be done short of some sort of proxing that adds latency and unreliability