I’ve had a dynamic DNS beacon set up to get back into my home machines for a couple years, and until yesterday it worked perfectly. When I went looking for why I couldn’t get to my SSH server, I found that I couldn’t log in to my DynDNS account, and a stream of errors from the router. Upon further investigation, DynDNS apparently sent a 5-day warning before expiration — which gmail helpfully marked as spam/possible phishing and kept out of my inbox until the account had expired. I guess people trying to do sketchy things with dyndns sub-domains have caused all of them to be blacklisted with the major email services.
I’d really like to have a DynamicDNS path attached to a subdomain from here, but none of the attractive hosting services had the feature included, and I haven’t figure out if/how to go about setting it up for myself. Until I have a chance to sort that out, I’m setting it back up with DynDNS (with a different domain, the old one was under “selfip.org” – not on the free menu anymore), but it’s an interesting failure for a collection of services designed for communication. It is also rather interesting how rarely Insight (the local Cable ISP) turns over IPs.
I’ve been on webfaction, and I like them a lot. Somebody asked them about doing dynamic DNS a while back, so they added an API call so you can write a script to do it with xmlrpc.
http://forum.webfaction.com/viewtopic.php?id=246
You should let me know if you ever decide you want to try them out and I’ll give you my referral code.