hi everyone,
I was just about to self-host a Ghost blog but then was warned that my ISP might change my external IP address at any time, so I would need to pay for a static IP address.
Is that true?
(I’d not seen much about that in stuff I’ve looked up so far about self hosting)
Email works fine with non-static IP addresses. I suspect VoIP does too.
No it does not. You need an active PTR record for email to work for most of the major carriers (Gmail, O365, etc…). Many providers will just outright block consumer IP ranges as well.
You cannot host an email server on dynamic addresses.
Edit: And you’ve edited in the VoIP part of your comment… Same thing there, you need PTR and such for those services to work well… Which generally can’t be assigned to dynamic addresses.
I never had an issue doing VoIP on a dynamic IP.
Then you have a SIP trunk provider that doesn’t validate domain ownership… I’d like to know that companies name if you don’t mind sharing. They’re stupidly rare to the point that I view it as a unicorn situation.
Edit: To clarify, I’ve tried finding such providers and failed for several years… They all want PTR validation for “security”
Ehh, yeah, it used to work fine. You’re right that is a much harder things to do these days
PTR lookups has been a thing for email servers for a very long time… “used to work fine” would have been early 2000’s as far as I can remember.
PTR is de facto requirement for over 20 years now. So unless you’re talking about pre-turn of the century, not really… email servers haven’t worked without PTRs for a very long time.
I had to look it up, but Yahoo and AOL implemented PTR checks in 2003-2004. Gmail had it out of the box in 2004.
Can you run a server without it? Yes… and it will work with any other server that doesn’t mandate valid PTR records. But no major consumer email server has supported receiving mail from a PTR-less server for 20+ years now. So you’re not going to be able to email basically anyone from your server.
Yes, I already agreed with you…
Reverse DNS is different than static IP.
But yes for outbound email, if you can’t control reverse DNS you will have pain. (Inbound is totally fine) You can in theory just use whatever hostname the ISP’s reverse DNS resolves to however you will get some spam score (or be rejected) as it doesn’t match your “from” domain.
Outbound email is a huge pain really no matter what. Unless you have a long-term lease on the IP and it isn’t in a bad network you really have to pay someone else if you want reliable delivery.
You can’t assign a PTR record without a static address though. No ISP will do PTR that follows DHCP updates. I haven’t had issues with my leased IPs from my ISP (Through Centurylink). Though a year back I moved and haven’t been able to get a leased IP from my new provider… I have to relay my emails now through a service, that has been a pain in the ass. But now we head into anecdotal nonsense.
And yes, we’re talking about hosting services. We’re in Selfhosted… and the OP is talking about publishing their ghost website… a webserver.
But no, email is otherwise not an issue. I’ve been selfhosting a couple of personal domains for over a decade without issue. I also host several email services for work… no issues outside of some of our clients who want us to use their SMTP servers which apparently suck. But not my issue if their IT fails at managing it.
Edit: DHCP -> PTR auto follow is a thing that exists though… which just makes it sad that ISPs don’t support it. I literally have hostname updates available and used inside of my own network. Just another sad day when pro-sumers are able to implement RFCs (RFC 2136, opnsense pushes updates to my internal DNS servers) better than ISPs.
You don’t need a PTR record though. I just use DKIM and SPF and have no issues.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4656926/emails-to-@gmail-com-bounce-back-complaining-about
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1iu0x33/anyone_else_seeing_ptr_record_issues_with_m365/
Yes you do need a ptr. The big services will outright block you.
Google I know for sure does not. They don’t even list it as a requirement. https://support.google.com/a/answer/174124?hl=en
The first link in my previous comment is literally gmail returning an error because no ptr…
Edit: your page is about setting up dkim while using their workspaces. You don’t control their ptrs.
Edit2: notice they don’t talk about SPF or dmarc on that page either. SPF has been require for google as well for a while and dmarc is highly recommended though not strictly required.
From over a year ago. Requirements change.
Does anyone know of a short course I could do/attend that teaches the basics of this networking stuff?
Your local college might do networking courses/stuff. honestly though, there’s enough youtube content out there by really respected people that you can likely just get away with that… Start with words/topics you see mentioned in this thread. Example, search youtube for DDNS… and if that video says something you don’t understand search for that topic. Eventually you’ll have a decent grasp on what’s going on.
yeah fair play - I’ll go that route. Do you happen to know any content creators who explain stuff well in this area?
(Context - our self-hosting is part of a wider project to make self-hosting easier, on the cheap, for normies)
“works fine” as in you can pretend it works, but you will get filtered by any larger email provider.
Dynamic IPs are filtered out, even on my server. This is done by using scores provided by Spamhaus. The majority of connects from such IPs are botnets.
You can run a private server on your dynamic IP. It should not connect to public servers though.