Saturday, 03 May 2014 JotBot Blog Hits: 1441

Being a long time fan of DynDNS.com , it was a great disappointment for me, when they announced that they will be stopping their free service completely. These guys started out with good intentions and offered a free service that allowed dynamic IPs to be updated and pinned to an easily remembered domain name. Yes, it was free! One such use of this service is to view home IP cameras. Most houses subscribed to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) would have a range of dynamic IPs issued to the household which rotates according to the Time To live lease. This made it impossible to hook up your IP camera and remotely view it from outside unless you knew what IP was assigned to your house hold at that moment.

Along came Dyndns service which was really awesome because they worked with major players in the networking equipment business and got their service listed as part of the DDNS services of common routers such as linksys and Asus. That meant that you would just have to register with Dyndns, setup a free domain name and you could program your router to update Dyndns services whenever your IP changed and your free domain name would get updated. Yeah! means that if you wanted to remotely view your camera or access your computer , you could just point to the free domain name and you would get access. 

So that is why when i got the email from Dyndns informing me that i will now have to start paying about 20 USD to get this service which i had been enjoying for free for close to 10 years now, i was like bummed out. (They actually made it free as long as you kept logging into your account monthly - but now they are even stopping that.. times must be bad)

Anyway, this got me to working out an alternative method to get the same services for close to free. It's not going to be entirely free because you would still need to own a domain name in order for this method to work. Lucky for me, i owned a few domain names, but they were all being used to point to websites. Not to worry, as long as you own the domain name and you can access the nameservers of the domain, you will be able to setup this free ddns service.

I made use of the subdomain in order to maximise the uses of a domain. so for example, my main domain is mydomain.com, i would set homecam.mydomain.com to point to my home router, then i use port numbers to detect my devices. This meant that my main domain could still point to my website and my subdomain homecam.mydomain.com would be used as my new domain to my home cameras!

The beauty about this method is that you would just need to set it up once and then you can forget about it, as long as you keep paying for your annual domain name renewal.

So your cost would be the annual price of the domain - about $12 USD , which you would already be paying if you had a website, so to me ,it was free.

Read more: Bypassing Dyn dns paid services

Saturday, 15 February 2014 JotBot Blog Hits: 1407

It seems that affiliate marketing is very popular in the USA. However, being in Singapore  and trying to deal with USA products and services can be a drag, here's how to solve it

Read more: Tor it