When I tell people what I do for a living, they don’t get it. I mean, they get that I am a marketing manager, but they don’t understand what the company I work for does exactly.
“Oh DNS, yeah no.” I often find myself going into a full blown explanation of DNS only to see their eyes glaze over 30 seconds in.
“Oh, so it’s how the Internet works.”
I chime in and say EXACTLY, but then I continue on to the Dynamic DNS explanation, which is even more coma-inducing.
The easiest explanation I can give is to relate Dynamic DNS to a cell phone. I don’t know anyone’s phone number, I can barely remember my own.
You program your friend’s phone numbers into your phone and you assign their name to that contact. Whenever you want to call “Joe” you just scroll to the contact for Joe and click call. This is so easy, right?
So now we can relate this to Dynamic DNS. What if you didn’t have this easy way to call Joe on your phone, you HAD to remember his phone number? It wouldn’t be too hard, but what if his phone number changed every day or even a few times a day? It would be really hard to remember his phone number. And even if you could remember his phone number, there is no way you could be 100% sure that the number you are calling is right, since it changes so frequently.
This is the problem that Dynamic DNS solves, but instead of on your cell phone, it is for your computer.
If you want to access your computer remotely, or even monitor an IP camera, but you have a Dynamic IP address it can be very difficult.
Wait, let’s back up for a second, what is a Dynamic IP address?
Your IP address is just like your phone number, but it is your computers personal phone number on the internet. It is used by your Internet Service Providers to connect your computer to the Internet. Your computer doesn’t have the same number every day, it has a dynamic IP address, meaning it changes. It could change once a month, once a week, or even a few times a day, but it does change. Dynamic IP addresses are very common since they are cost effective for ISPs.
Since a large majority of people have a Dynamic IP address at home, it can be extremely difficult to always reach your device, because your IP address is always changing. Since you aren’t alerted when it changes, it is very hard to keep track of.
To get around this annoyance, you can use our Dynamic DNS service. Our Dynamic DNS service gives you an easy to remember hostname i.e. yourname.noip.me, (just like when you assign “Joe” to his phone number in your phone) you run a small piece of software on your computer or device you would like to access remotely, and whenever your IP address changes, we update your hostname to reflect that change.
Imagine if your cell phone number did change every day, but your phone knew this and kept track of each person’s phone number, and updated your contact in your phone automatically when a person’s phone number changed. Your connection to your friends would never be lost. This is just like Dynamic DNS, your connection to access your device or computer remotely is never lost.
It’s a long-winded explanation, for a fairly simple service that helps millions of users across the globe stay connected to their devices.
Check out this awesome article to read one customer’s story about how he uses No-IP every day.
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