Phase 9 - Web Server Control (resumed)

Community is such a great ideal and it's the reasoning behind why I'm documenting this build, so others can possibly learn and have some fun. I'd like to thank user birdmun for the suggestion to try out noip.com. I had researched dyndns.com on a relative's suggestion and was turned off by their paid services for a project which may still encounter unforseen circumstances which renders it void.

Enter www.noip.com, which is a free management tool for people such as myself who are under the restriction of having a random dynamic DNS address. Basically, when you set up the free account, you download a daemon program, which runs all the time in the background of your home computer and systematically pings your IP address and if it changes, it will run an update and reforward your IP address so that it essentially appears/becomes static.

It's super easy to set up and gives you up to 3 free limited domain names which you can allocate (assuming it's not taken) any way you want such as myrobotproject.ddns.net, myarduinochatserver.ddns.net, etc. You can, however, still just enter your IP address and get served the page.

The only minor drawback is that every 30 days, you essentially have to respond to their reminder to keep those addresses active otherwise, they kill the sites. Not a deal-breaker for me, since it's free and easy.

You'll still have to login to your physical router and set up port forwarding, but that's the only other step in the process and it's extremely well documented on noip.com for people who have never done anything like this before. Since it's all documented there and they have examples for just about every type of router, as well as step by step tutorials, I won't document this step here.

Thanks again, birdmun!