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Our
marathon fourteenth Q & A of the week comes from Antonio via the PCstats Feedback
page . If you have a question you need answered right
away, try our friendly forums
for help too.
Q: I would like to know how I can get a
static IP address even though I have a dynamic address. I know
you have to pay when getting a static IP from an ISP, but I've
already set up my web server at home and I'd like to have my own server and host
my personal website on it. Someone told me that, you could get your static
IP with a script, can you provide me with the script?
A: You don't need a script, but what you do need is a
service; a dynamic DNS service to be precise.
DNS (Domain Naming System) maps IP
addresses to Internet URLs like www.pcstats.com
. Normally this is a static process, meaning you give your IP address of
your web server to whomever you registered your website name with and they associate it with the
URL. Of course, if your
IP address changes every time you connect to the Internet, this is completely useless since anyone entering your URL will
get an old IP which no longer connects to your web server.
The solution is to use one of
the many dynamic DNS providers. These free services allow you to
create a DNS name (URL) for your website (out of a limited
selection) and will install a small client application on your computer which
monitors your IP address and updates the URL each time it changes. In
this way, every time your web server receives a new IP address, the dynamic
DNS service will update the URL pointing to it with the new
information. As far as anyone coming to your website from the
Internet is concerned, you now have a static IP.
If you do not like the DNS
names you can create with the dynamic DNS service, nothing is stopping you from
linking them to the website name you registered. For example, if you
registered www.mydomain.biz and created a
dynamic DNS account for the url mydomain.sytes.net, go to the
company you registered www.mydomain.biz with and enter
mydomain.sytes.net as the location of your webserver. Anyone
who visits your site will be bounced to the dynamic DNS site and from
there to the correct IP of your web server.
DynDNS and No-IP are two of several
dynamic IP providers out there.
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