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 buy my domains from namecheap but i use cloudflare for name servers (free tier, dns only for everything) and have ddclient (or whatever the newest version is called now) which runs on my router. my current settings only update cloudflare when the interface changes, and then update time after the change is about 15 minutes for propagation. i work in the network department of my isp so my address doesn’t change often, but the isp side of my setup is identical to any other subscriber. i use opnsense, but also manage a very small pfsense box that this works on as well. i update ipv4 dynamically, but not ipv6 yet, but i will.