Greetings,
my current ISP refuses to provide me a static IP and they also blocks incoming connection to my ipv6 so I can’t host services on just ipv6 too. I will be changing my ISP when the plan expires.
without public IP I can host my own IRC bouncer but I would like to know what else can I self host? Thanks in advance!
Anything. You don’t need any services to be public unless you choose for them to be.
actually I was thinking about hosting my own fediverse service to own my data but I can’t do that without a static public IP and domain name.
As long as you’re not behind CGNAT, you can use a dynamic DNS provider (like duckdns.org) and its web API to keep a record pointed at your IP. If you’re behind CGNAT, Tailscale also has a service (Tailscale Funnel) that can expose an internal service to the internet.
You could also pay for a small VPS with a static IP, and set up a Wireguard tunnel to your home server and an HTTPS proxy to forward traffic through the tunnel.
Also, just in general, use Tailscale. It’s serious black magic fuckery on the firewall.
Yeah I am behind CGNAT so I guess I have to use either Tailscale or wireguard as other users also suggested.
Thank you for the reply!
Just to chip in, cloudflare tunnels are a thing and also transverse CGNAT. Or you could use LocalXPosed, and other sevices like that.
I tried using DuckDNS for a while for DDNS, but noticed it seemed to have frequent periods of a few minutes each when it just wouldn’t resolve. Also was unable to get a matrix/synapse setup working behind it. It’s handy as a free service and nice if you just need basic DDNS, but it’s not the most reliable for hosting stuff from my experience.
I eventually settled on buying my own domain. Was much cheaper and easier to figure out DNS management than I was expecting, and my hosted services run so smoothly now.
Edit RE: downvotes: fuck me for sharing my experience? Kinda thought that was the point of this community…
You actually want a cloudfare tunnel if youre going to do that. It protects your real IP. Hosting a fediverse instance will draw attention to your real IP eventually otherwise.
Put everything behind Tailscale or another VPN and use it that way from outside devices. There should be very little need to have a public IP, and if there’s something that has to be exposed, use ngrok, cloudflared or Tailscale Funnel.
Tailscale or Cloudflare will solve your problems.
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As someone in a similar situation I’d recommend using a free tier oracle vps with a wireguard tunnel to connect to you services. Effectively just using the vps as a proxy for your own network. Here’s a guide that should work for your purposes https://github.com/mochman/Bypass_CGNAT
You can self host anything like this, all you need is buying a domain and set something up like DynDNS which updates the entry of the domain with your new IPv4 as soon as it changes.
I would recommend to not open your services to public, but set up a wireguard (or other VPN) endpoint in your home, which you then use to access all your services.
I think, an alternative to that would be some servicees from tailscale or cloudflare, I suppose
I just use a DDNS updater. That’s honestly good enough for most purposes.
Alternatively, you could use a service like Zerotier, Tailscale or Netbird to create a virtual private LAN connection to a free Oracle VPS, then route the traffic from the VPN to your home network.
Literally anything you want. You don’t need a static IP, any dynamic IP with a software updater will work. For example, I have some public sites proxied through Cloudflare, and I use the DDNS updater for Docker that keeps my DNS correct.
I just have a script that checks my IP every few minutes and changes the DNS record as necessary
You can use Tailscale, you can access your personal services with it but also expose public services with their Funnels system.
Keep in mind that while the clients are open source, their servers are running proprietary software.
I started using headscale (the opensource reimplementation of tailscale server) on a private vps. It is incredibly better compared to plain wireguard. I regret waiting so much before switching.
Something that really made my life easier: wireguard is poor at roaming: switching to and from my wifi created issues because the server wasn’t reachable anymore from its public ip and wireguard didn’t bother to query the DNS again to check the new IP. Also, configuration is dead simple because it takes care of iptables for you (especially good when you enables forwarding to a node).
Since the server just sends small messages for the control plane and all the traffic is p2p between the devices, the smallest vps with the smaller connectivity is more than enough to handle it.
my current ISP refuses to provide me a static IP
So then use dynamic dns? HurricaneElectric offers DynDNS now and it’s great. You can update it right over
curl
if you want. I have it mapped to a cli function;~\downloads ❯ ddns HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate Content-Length: 18 Content-Type: text/html Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:24:18 GMT Email: DNS Administrator <dnsadmin@he.net> Expires: Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:24:18 GMT Server: dns.he.net v0.0.1 nochg {ip}
It’s not only not static It’s firewalled too! I can’t ping it from outside the network
Oh, damn. Not much you can do then. You may be eventually be able to get something outrageously complicated to work, but honestly it’s just plain not worth it. Just get a cheap VPS.
Best you could do is a forward server with tailscale and a reverse_proxy, but I’ve never had any real luck getting that type of setup to work reliably.
Did you configure NAT to the service(s) and/or DMZ to your internal server in your ISP’s router?
Not allowing even ping seems like it is against any sane networking configuration.
Use Cloudflare’s free tier tunnel
They’ll shut it down if you send more than a few megabytes down that tunnel. It’s ok if you just need a connection (for ssh and stuff) but anything that generates a lot of traffic will be blocked.
I haven’t checked the ToS in a while but last I checked it was 50mb upload limit for the free tier and a loosely policed no video streaming. And they don’t shut you down if you send files larger than 50mb, the upload just fails. I served over 8 million requests through the free tier last month.
Anything
I use cloudflare / cloudflared agent to provide features hosted locally
I believe duckdns has a tool that checks your public ip on a schedule to update your subdomain. (Which they provide for free last I checked)
That would solve not having a static IP, not solving having no port forward right?
You usually only need to specify the internal host ip to setup a port forward. It should forward that to whatever the public ip is at the time.
If the isp is providing the model/router and generally being oppressive i highly recommend researching if you can place your own router behind it.
Oh I’m fine, static IP and so on, but, for example, my friend has this crappy shared ports system so I’m interested in something alleviating that. What you described seemed like the solution to non-static IP addresses so I just commented that.
Cheers
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