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)
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.
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)