I have been using no-ip for around two years to remotely access my hosted service, I mostly use their free service except for a few 5 months offers I bought.
Recently, I received a full year offer in email for 8$ (COUPON CODE: MAY8), and I was wondering whether to get that or buy a 2 years domain for the same price (FROM hostinger or namecheap).
I have never bought a doamain before and my knowledge is limited to what I mostly read here. So, per your opinion, what would be better in term of usability and security, a DDNS on the router and a port open per hosted-service? or a domain with reverse proxy?
I opted for dynamic dns and reverse proxy. I configured my reverse proxy to use TLS and also to require client certificates, which I install on my devices. You get so much flexibility and added consistency to your application security that I feel it is a must.
Would you please share what dynamic dns provider you use? I remember trying to set nginx pm to use my no-ip hostname (xyz.ddns.net) but I could not figure out how to link my hosted-services as subdomains (say portainer.xyz.ddns.net)
I’m using Dynu for DDNS. They support subdomains as part of their DNS. You can configure nginx to service/route requests to each subdomain differently.
Another option is subpaths: xyz.ddns.net/portainer
Just one open port, to your reverse proxy (nginx or other).
The client updating no-ip with your dynamic IP is independent of the reverse proxy software.
While you can do that, you should be aware of the security implications (every application can see and modify every other application’s cookies). If at all possible, I would try to avoid this setup.
I second that. This practice comes from a time where domain names were expensive, in many ways: SNI didn’t exist/wasn’t wide-spread, so each domain name on HTTPS needed a dedicated IP, Certificates weren’t democratized yet via letsencrypt/acme and most hosts were big enough to run multiple services, because virtualization wasn’t as widely available yet. So putting apps on sub-paths made sense.
Now all of those things are basically dealt with and putting each app on its own sub-domain just makes way more sense.