I have a current domain name registered from no-ip.com. They also act as my domain name server.
I’m running websites from VMs and use HTTPs certs obtained through LetsEncrypt. I’m currently renewing these certs using the HTTP challenge method with acme.
I’m looking however for a different solution for renewal of the certificates that use DNS renewal rather than the web based folder method. I contacted no-ip and unfortunately they don’t offer any service that is compatible with LetsEncrypt.
We use Linode. There doesn’t seem to be any charge for using their DNS API, but you probably do need to purchase some kind of service from them to get access to the DNS Manager. Worst case you could get a $5/month VPS and use it as an offsite endpoint for something.
Thanks for all recommendations – I kept my domain registrar however luckily I was able to modify the nameservers to point to Cloudflare. Very easy to setup a Cloudflare account and manage the DNS records – changes tend to propagate fast. I then was able to update my Let’sEncrypt Certs and do dns-authentication to renew the certs against Cloudflare. That worked fairly well. Maybe I’ll open another thread about Let’sEncrypt Certs since I have a question about offering RSA as well as ECDSA certs.
I then had to play around with making Cloudflare compatible with a Dynamic DNS for the host. I wanted redundancy in this method so I ended up using pfSense’s Dynamic Update Client (DUC), DNSOMatic, and FreeNas’ Dynamic Update Client (which operates through DNSOMatic). Using pfSense’s Dynamic Update Service was super easy with Cloudflare and it worked pretty much out of the box (I’m surprised Tom has never touched on this but its really easy). DNSOMatic on the other hand was a major pain in the ass which required a lot of modification of the Cloudflare DNS records, records at the DNSOMatic’s website, and trial and error of the DNSOMatic Client (I used both the client on pfSense and the client on FreeNAS for redundancy). I probably should write out the proper method of using DNSOMatic with Cloudflare since it took a lot of experimenting. Not sure where I’d put that writeup however.
Lastly I need an email forwarder for my domain which I can use the domain name as part of the email address. I’m looking at options of using MailGun (https://mailgun.com) or rolling my own Forwarder using an Ubuntu VM installed through xcp-ng (https://github.com/forwardemail/free-email-forwarding-service#self-hosted-requirements). I’m wondering if anyone has any additional advice for a preferably free or lost cost email forwarder.
Yea I kept looking around for email forwarders and I found an article someone wrote https://woorkup.com/email-forwarding-service/. An opinion piece for sure, however I did see most of the names on this list come up over and over again when researching the topic of e-mail forwarders. Currently setup a free account with mailgun. I’ll guess I’ll take it for a test drive for awhile, and then would most likely try improvmx next.
Another option that I have used would be to setup Proxmox Mail Gateway either on bare metal or as a VM. I use that normally in front of my mail server and it works great as well and can to more complex spam filtering as well as forwarding to another email address like improvmx.