DynDNS used to be the de facto for offering free dynamic DNS to home users, allowing easy web hosting from home using free sub-domains. As of late last year, they’ve stopped offering free accounts. However if you ask them, they’ll advise it’s still possible, but you need to provide a credit card number. Sounds fishy, ey?

Thanks to their long term free DDNS offerings, DynDNS have found their way into many networking manufacturers equipment from home routers to IP cameras, all hard coded in the firmware to offer free DDNS by simply adding your account details to your device for seamless DNS updates. But no more, this is now a redundant feature in many devices around the world.

DynDNS state that you can sign up for a Pro trial, and if you cancel your trial - they’ll let you keep one domain name for free, allowing use to the server just like before. Technically it sounds OK, but I imagine many aren’t keen on giving credit card details when there’s really no need to (I guess they’re banking on people not cancelling the account!).

It’s been quite hard to find a decent alternative, I need a host which offers updates via the standard well known protocols (so ddclient has a chance of working), and also supports MX record updates (hard to find for free), but after some trial and error - the answer was FreeDNS (freedns.afraid.org).

FreeDNS really are free, and offer hundreds of top level domains, plus support for updating your own MX record also (bonus!). I’d highly recommend them if you’re on the market for a new DDNS provider.

	Posted July 11, 2012
	Written by John Payne