this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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What can you do with your own domain name in regards to self hosting? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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One perk that someone told me about is that you can use your domain to get around not having a static IP (because the DNS will compensate).

If I were to get a Cloudflare domain name then what would be some other pros and cons?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • good-looking domains instead of IPs
  • tons of subdomains instead of ports
  • universally recognized TLS certs via Let's Encrypt. DNS challenges are the way to go - you don't even have to expose your HTTP server
  • dynamic DNS, again available via API
  • [email protected] (better not to self-host, but to use an email provider)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Wanted to expand on your custom domain for an email since this is something I do to get a more professional email address to put on my resume. A lot of DNS services like Cloudflare or NameCheap will actually let you create email addresses off of your custom domain that will just forward to a different email of your choosing, and generally free or very very cheap as well. If you want to be able to actually send emails from your custom domain, you can setup a Google Workspace account with a single seat for $5 a month and have a fully hosted email solution that uses your custom domain name.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can also do this with iCloud+ for 99 cents a month.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Purelymail

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Proton mail will let you do wildcard email and it's only $3-4 a month. If you need smtp support then you can just setup a hydroxide container.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

better to use zoho. Zoho mails provides you 5 free custom email for free and zeptomail allows you to send k emails for 1 dollars

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

When I used Zoho Free, many of my emails would end up in people's spam folders. My domain is certainly not on any blacklist, it was pointed correctly and with the security and domain validation features enabled and everything configured properly. Deployed it to small business clients as well and same result.

Gmail doesn't seem to like Zoho.

What seemed to work like a charm was to use iCloud+ Custom Email and just add my custom domain addresses as aliases on Gmail. It's like having a custom domain Google Workspace without paying anything (apart from the iCloud subscription that gives you a ton of space for all your data).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

more professional email address

Does it even work?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

tons of subdomains instead of ports

Just to be clear for OP, that applies only for protocols that "support DNS" as in, they send the DNS in the protocol.

The one I have in mind: http(s) and emails.

Games, FTP and most of the protocols don't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Still a bit wrong. You can use things like Portzilla and make it so that certain subdomains are for certain game servers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can also just use a web server like apache and have it forward the traffic to the correct place depending on the sub domain. This is what I do, I can have minecraft.mydomain.com route to 192.168.1.40:5000 and valheim.mydomain.com route to 192.168.1.40:27015.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Hum, then I am missing something because portzilla is just a reverse proxy by the look of it

This mean:

  • you need to use http (games and ftp don't)

Or

  • you have multiple IPs (one per sub domain if I want to go with the examples from portzilla).

I assumed OP was in IPV4 and only has one IP.

Just to be sure from my other assumptions (kinda ELI5)

  • DNS doesn't exist on the transport layer. It is converted to an IP and your computer just try to connect to that IP. So whatever DNS you use, if they point to the same IP you have no way to distinguish from what "DNS" they want to go.

This is how networking works. Only with IP, no DNS.

  • some applications (http), added support for DNS. When the user type a DNS, even if your computer still use IP to reach the server, the browser will introduce itself by telling the server the DNS it tried to reach.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
  • universally recognized TLS certs via Let's Encrypt. DNS challenges are the way to go - you don't even have to expose your HTTP server

Just a note, as we've had this discussion before: DNS ACME challenges will publish the FQDN of every service you encrypt to a public record, which some sites will scrape up. Just in case this bothers some people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

universally recognized TLS certs via Let's Encrypt. DNS challenges are the way to go - you don't even have to expose your HTTP server

I use DNS challenges for mine as well, but I have been manually renewing my cert every time. Is there a way to automate letsencrypt/cerbot renewal when you use DNS challenges?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

can recommend acme.sh if on Linux