
DynDNS ends free services - leeoniya
http://linktracking.dyn.com/?xm=Yk12KE0kmS00AO0jm2tbXFth
======
dewey
Alternatives I switched to a while ago:

\- [https://freedns.afraid.org/](https://freedns.afraid.org/)

\- [https://ydns.eu/](https://ydns.eu/)

What I like about these two is that you are able to update the IP by just
curl'ing a certain URL, which works great in combination with a cronjob.

Edit: It looks like OP submitted the tracking URL from the newsletter, his ID
is probably going to stick out in their analytics.

~~~
korzun
Another vote for [https://freedns.afraid.org](https://freedns.afraid.org), the
guy who runs it is a great dude.

~~~
Brandon0
Exactly what he said.

~~~
korzun
I just wanted to back it up as one of their paying customers for the past 5
years who had plenty of interaction with the owner.

Ironically your comment brings even less value to the table.

------
chrissnell
Rackspace offers DNS with all cloud accounts and doesn't charge for it. As far
as I know, you can sign up for a cloud account and not actually purchase any
services, though I would probably put some files in Cloud Files so you're at
least paying them something to keep the account around. You can update your
records via their API or via their control panel and there are no per-change
or per-domain fees.

You're getting professionally-run DNS servers, distributed with anycast.

~~~
iancarroll
Route 53 is also really cheap if you're an AWS kind of guy/gal for 50 cents a
domain. The usage charges are beyond low (think 1 cent) for smaller sites.

~~~
icoloma
Has anyone compared Route53 with the new Google Cloud DNS?
[https://developers.google.com/cloud-
dns/](https://developers.google.com/cloud-dns/)

I'm interested in differences feature-wise.

~~~
donavanm
I havent seen a point by point comparison. Feature set, and even the API, are
basically identical for now.

------
skrowl
For what it's worth, if you use namecheap.com as your DNS registrar then you
have this type of service already for free.

If you don't use namecheap, then you're doing it wrong ;)

~~~
lftl
I know it's not strictly NameCheap's fault, but I moved all my DNS off of
their servers after the recent DDOS had them down for hours.

~~~
film42
Same. At work we had a high traffic website using namecheap DNS and we had to
transfer to Route 53 to avoid the chance of another DDoS.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I feel sorry for those people who have routers that only have built-in support
for DynDNS. :(

~~~
zdw
I feel sorry for people whose routers aren't running OpenWRT, PFSense, or some
other easily upgradable modern firmware that's free of backdoors.

~~~
archagon
Actually, I've been wondering lately, just how common are router compromises?
I ask because I have a Synology unit that was infected with some pretty
insidious malware just by being out on the open internet and having a slightly
out-of-date OS version. Since it's now easily possible to scan the entire IPv4
address space, it makes me wonder if having out-of-date firmware would
basically guarantee a hacked router these days.

~~~
damian2000
If it is common, its likely those doing it want it to remain a secret... so
not sure its possible to get a good estimate.

------
floatingatoll
I started paying them a couple years ago for my DynDNS service, and have had
no trouble in that time. I'm glad they chose to keep the service rather than
shutting it down. And I'm especially glad to see them charging a small fee for
a valuable service, rather than running it for free:
[https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/)

~~~
bhaak
IMO they could have handled the transition to non-free better. But every time
they took away some of the free stuff, you have seen popular outrage. They
pissed off lots of people that could have been potential customers and I was
one of them.

Their lowest price plan is 25$ per year. If I only would want the most basic
feature, that is having 1 or 2 dynamic ip addresses bound to a specific DNS
entry (not even wildcard or email redirection), that is too much. I would have
gladly paid 5$ for that even if only to get rid of the 30 day renewal routine.

But when the time came for me to register my own domain, I didn't want DynDNS
to do it. I've seen how they treated me when I was a non-paying customer.

~~~
pseudosavant
I totally agree with your sentiment. But I have to say a 'non-paying customer'
isn't a customer at all, by definition. ;)

------
Osiris
I have been using their free service for a very long time, so this is a big
disappointing.

However, I recently bought a new ASUS router that includes an ASUS dynamic DNS
service built in (asuscomm.com) that works really well.

There's an app that allows me to wake up my computers remotely via my Android
phone, and I can VPN into my network to do SSH/Remote Desktop.

The nice thing about DynDNS is that it was widely supported by routers,
including DD-WRT and Tomato.

------
pmh
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7546300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7546300)

------
nodata
[http://en.gandi.net/](http://en.gandi.net/) offers free secondary dns with
all domains you buy/renew through them.

~~~
darklajid
Given that I just left gandi after 2 days: Please be sure that you want to do
business with them and that you've thoroughly checked their offerings.

I'm kinda guilty on part two and can answer part one with a resounding 'no'.

Their no bullshit claim didn't apply here, I cannot and won't recommend them.

~~~
eridius
Can you elaborate? I own 2 domains through them and have been nothing but
happy with them so far.

~~~
StavrosK
I have two domains with them as well and can't complain, but their UI doesn't
exactly shout "trustworthy".

------
brianobush
I have used them for years under their free model. I signed up for 2 years
instantly after receiving an email regarding this. In my mind, they have
earned it: A great service and free for all these years. I think this is a
great way to move from free to paid services.

------
specialp
Hurricane electric offers free dynDNS, free DNS, and also free IPv6 tunneling.
[https://dns.he.net/](https://dns.he.net/) You can even set up an IPv6 tunnel
for a dynamic IP and have it update dynamically.

~~~
greyskull
+1 to this. I've only touched very basic usage, but it was easy. And it's
HE... big name and comes with reliability.

~~~
MichaelGG
>And it's HE... big name and comes with reliability

Our experience is the opposite. LA to Denver and at least once a week Nagios
goes batshit because packetloss pops up to 8% on and off for hours. Partly
this is because our unfortunate choice of ISP, IPTP, doesn't understand how
BGP works and localprefs HE over everything. But consensus seems to be that
they're just overloaded.

I suppose selling for a third or less of other ISPs tends to increase network
demand.

------
bbunix
Inevitable... moved off DynDNS earlier this year in favor of Amazon's Route53.
DNS bills went down 99%... and Amazon has been great.

~~~
tracker1
What have your bills looked like, if you don't mind my asking? I've been
running a VM server on a business cable connection, but thinking on getting
rid of that in favor of a few cloud/hosted systems, and virtual DNS.

------
mjs7231
I always ran a homebrew dynamic dns service on my domains from whatever VPS
provider I used at the time. Basically create a new A record on your domain
(ex: home.example.com), then run one of these scripts periodically on your
home machine to keep that A record updated. Here are are the two that are
still relevant:

Digital Ocean: [http://pushingkarma.com/notebook/dynamic-dns-your-home-pc-
us...](http://pushingkarma.com/notebook/dynamic-dns-your-home-pc-using-
digitaloceans-api/)

Linode: [http://pushingkarma.com/notebook/setup-dynamic-dns-using-
lin...](http://pushingkarma.com/notebook/setup-dynamic-dns-using-linode/)

------
ChrisArchitect
recently, I think thru a show HN post on here, I discovered and started using
[http://hopper.pw](http://hopper.pw). works great/some c00l commandline
features etc

~~~
jarus
I'm using it and it works very well. You can also add custom domains if your
dns server supports the nsupdate API.

------
cookiecaper
dyndns has been getting progressively more hostile to free users for years. I
thought it was ridiculous years ago when I switched to no-ip.org, I'm
surprised that anyone has held on this long.

~~~
emptybits
What hostility or ridiculousness did you see?

I've been on Dyn forever, as a free user to keep a host entry for one remote,
nonprofit dynamic-IP server. Starting exactly a year ago, once per month they
sent me an email with a link I'd click to keep my free hostname(s) active.
Seemed reasonable.

~~~
unreal37
I used to be on EasyDNS and they got acquired by DynDNS many years back. They
really have been trying to kick off the free users for a long time. Anyone
who's hung on til now is a survivor.

They dropped from 5 free hostnames to 2, in 2010. And they have been enforcing
this "log into your account monthly" since at least that time. Not 1 year, but
at least 4 years or more. That's how I lost my free hostname - because I
missed a month. Thanks Dyn!

~~~
dchuk
What exactly do you expect from a free service? Seems like they're doing more
than enough to accommodate you, a user who makes them nothing while costing
them something.

~~~
unreal37
Fair enough.

What I expect is that a company should either offer a free service and serve
those customers well, or not offer it at all.

Offering a free service, but then being hostile to those people each and every
month, is the worst of the options they could take. My 2 cents.

Lots of other companies, including my domain registrar, offer this service for
free too.

------
larrys
Previous thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7546300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7546300)

------
tedchs
Google now offers Cloud DNS, conceptually similar to Amazon Route53. Has a
pretty nice CLI and REST API, and serves using Anycast.
[https://developers.google.com/cloud-
dns/](https://developers.google.com/cloud-dns/)

------
neves
A little known fact: If you have a Brazilian domain, you have free DNS at
Registro.br, the official country register.

I stopped to use dyndns since they started doing it some years ago. The
interface is a lot better, and you will have quicker responses for your
Brazilian visitors.

------
goombastic
The real problem is routers have hardwired dyndns settings; in many cases with
no other options.

~~~
solnyshok
Actually, there are programs you can install on a pc behind your router, that
will perform the same function, i.e. Pinging some dyndns provider other than
router's builtin one. i think I used one by namecheap in windows exe form.

------
aktau
I haven't found anything that beats the ease of use of LuaDNS [1] though. Edit
a simple lua script, git push and done!

[1] [http://www.luadns.com/](http://www.luadns.com/)

------
bitJericho
Might I recommend gandi and also [http://code.google.com/p/gandi-automatic-
dns/](http://code.google.com/p/gandi-automatic-dns/)

------
shinratdr
Switched to No-IP, took a couple minutes. No big deal, I've never really liked
DynDNS anyways, they were far to aggressive in trying to force upgrades.

------
bits
What DNS hosting providers can you recommend?

Preferably with an API or other means to programmatically make changes to
zones. Bonus points for SRV and TXT records support.

~~~
chrisfarms
We've been using dnsmadeeasy[1] for years. There's something dated about their
interface/presentation, but the service has been rock solid and fast since day
one.

[1] [http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com](http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com)

~~~
8ig8
Came here to say the same. DNSMadeEasy doesn't feel _fancy_, but it has always
worked great for us. Solid service. Highly recommended.

Edit: Not that it matters much, but it was Textdrive's (née Joyant)
recommendation back in '04 that got me to sign up. If anything, they've been
around a while.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060427025139/http://forum.text...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060427025139/http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=12831)

------
godDLL
I've switched to using [http://entrydns.net](http://entrydns.net) some time
back. Worked out good so far.

------
ing33k
[https://dns.he.net/](https://dns.he.net/) is pretty good ( run by Hurricane
Electric )

------
ah-
Is anyone here hosting their own dyndns setup?

~~~
__david__
Yeah, I wrote a little http endpoint that I access with curl in a cron job.
The server updates my master DNS git repo and which then updates the data in
Route 53.

The DNS stuff is based on a Perl module I wrote called Net::DNS::Create [1].
It allows you to use a little DSL-ish language to create your DNS entries,
then compile them into whatever DNS backend you want (Bind, TinyDNS, and
Route53 are supported out of the box, and all have been used in production at
some point). A quick example of what this might look like is here:
[https://github.com/caldwell/net-dns-
create/blob/master/creat...](https://github.com/caldwell/net-dns-
create/blob/master/create.example)

[1] [http://search.cpan.org/~david/Net-DNS-
Create-v0.10.0/lib/Net...](http://search.cpan.org/~david/Net-DNS-
Create-v0.10.0/lib/Net/DNS/Create.pm)

------
dale386
I have a feeling that we're going to start seeing a lot of this post LogMeIn's
cancellation of free services.

------
minutetominute
You can pretty much do the same thing with an OpenVPN server anyways.

------
wildmXranat
great posts here. marking it for later

~~~
theGimp
Please use something like Pinboard, Pocket, Bitly, or Instapaper.

You put everything in one list, and the comment section stays on point :)

Links:

[https://pinboard.in/](https://pinboard.in/)

[https://bitly.com/](https://bitly.com/)

[http://getpocket.com/](http://getpocket.com/)

[https://www.instapaper.com/](https://www.instapaper.com/)

