Hi everyone,

a couple of friends and I have a Jellyfin server running which is exposed to the internet via a reverse-proxy and https by using a free dynDNS provider.

The setup is working fine besides the dynDNS provider. We constantly face connection issues, making the dynamic DNS functionality very unreliable.

So I started looking into possible solutions and one particular would be to buy an own domain which would only cost a few bucks each month. With this I could keep the current setup and would just need to change the domain (and possibly the SSL certificate). I found a provider over which I could buy (rent?) a domain and which also provides dynDNS functionality. But I am not too sure if I understood this correctly:

  • if I have an own domain, why would I need the additional dynDNS functionality? I would guess that I would just continue updating your server’s IP address to the domain name like we are doing now
  • can the provider over which I rent the domain with servers in my country actually see what our traffic is? Especially since we are streaming our movies etc.
  • is there a better way of obtaining and setting up your own domain also in terms of privacy and reliability than with a bigger company offering such services?

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

Edit: An important fact I forgot to add in my main post is that during these issues, the general server connection should be fine since it is located at a friends house and his internet connection is unaffected (e.g. we could still talk in Discord normally and he had no internet issues whatsoever)

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    17 hours ago

    Agree with the other 2 replies that hammering the dyndns server every minute is excessive and you should only send them updates when your IP address actually changes.

    You should also check the TTL on the primary name server (the dyndns server) and the DNS server you use (likely your ISP’s DNS server).

    https://johncireland.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/viewing-dns-record-ttl-on-windows/

    The dyndns server probably has it configured right and it should have a low TTL like 5 minutes or below, but sometimes the DNS server you use can be a server that ignores TTL and caches the result for longer than expected. I don’t think this is the problem if multiple of your friends are having the same problem but it doesn’t hurt to check.