Andrei DANEASA

Absolutely true, but what about inviting somebody to visit your localhost? Hard to give him the IP address, especially when is changing frequently.

I often need to show to my friends/partners things that are located on my webserver, and from various reasons (e.g. Oracle hosting is damn expensive) I cannot upload them on a hosting server.

What are the possibilities?

1. Telling them your IP address.
   Relatively poor solution, since the second day your IP address might change if you don’t have a fixed one, it’s hard for them to remember a number sequence, it’s not so stylish, doesn’t have a meaning.
2. Buy a domain and point it to your server.
   Nice solution, you can buy something that includes “test” or “demo” and you are all set. More than this, you can host your email at Google apps. However, 2 issues here: notice the word “buy”, and DNS propagation will take a little. If your IP changes frequently then you can have some issues.
3. Get from DynDNS.com a CNAME entry (subdomain) for up to five of their hostnames. You’ll get for example myserver.kicks-ass.net and this will point to your IP address. Free, fast, no need to wait for the DNS progagation, reliable (DynDNS offers this for 8 years).

Of course, in all the situation you need to take care of the following:

• Good firewall, since you’ll get lot of nasty visitors
• Port forwarding from your router, if you are using a router.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Web.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.