02-17-2021, 04:10 AM
sekker wrote:
[quote=mattkime]
>We are wrestling with online game connectivity, and our ISP charges $10/month for a static IP address.
Have you considered a dynamic dns service?
We have not come across this as a specific solution. This is also not an area of my expertise. But if you have some recommended options, I can read and learn!
Pretty much everything you wrote in your original post is "not an area of my expertise", and the only thing I understand is "static IP address", but I have no idea how that relates to your problem/solutions.
A dynamic DNS service is a way to get behavior similar to a static IP but with a dynamic one. Instead of have a hard coded IP, you have a hard coded domain name that will resolve to whatever your dynamic IP address currently is.
Many routers support a number of these services and some of them are free. I use https://www.noip.com/remote-access and their free level, and that can give you a domain name like sekker.ddns.net that will resolve to your current dynamic IP address. If your ISP changes your dynamic IP, your router will notify the service to update the IP that the domain name will resolve to.
In my experience it can be many many months before Comcast will change my dynamic IP address, but having a domain name through this service I'm always able to reach my home.
Since there's no such thing as a free lunch, with noip.com they "make you pay" by forcing you to renew the "free" domain name every 30 days. They send you email warnings, and it just takes a minute or two, but this nagging is to steer you to their paid service which doesn't require 30 day renewals. I've been using them for more than two years and never paid them a cent, and renewed every month.