Hi everyone,
Edit2: I bought a domain (1,50€ p.m.) from a European service which also offers dynDNS functionality. Just needed to adjust my NGINX config and generated new SSL-certificates via Certbot. I also built a script that only issues the update URL if the actually IP has changed. The system has been running flawlessy now for a couple of days already. No outages or any other connection issues. Learning: even though the dynDNS functionality should work stable in theory (since there is not much going on), the dynDNS service provider actually plays a big role in terms of reliability.
a couple of friends and I have a Jellyfin server running which is exposed to the internet via a reverse-proxy and https by using a free dynDNS provider.
The setup is working fine besides the dynDNS provider. We constantly face connection issues, making the dynamic DNS functionality very unreliable.
So I started looking into possible solutions and one particular would be to buy an own domain which would only cost a few bucks each month. With this I could keep the current setup and would just need to change the domain (and possibly the SSL certificate). I found a provider over which I could buy (rent?) a domain and which also provides dynDNS functionality. But I am not too sure if I understood this correctly:
- if I have an own domain, why would I need the additional dynDNS functionality? I would guess that I would just continue updating your server’s IP address to the domain name like we are doing now
- can the provider over which I rent the domain with servers in my country actually see what our traffic is? Especially since we are streaming our movies etc.
- is there a better way of obtaining and setting up your own domain also in terms of privacy and reliability than with a bigger company offering such services?
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Edit: An important fact I forgot to add in my main post is that during these issues, the general server connection should be fine since it is located at a friends house and his internet connection is unaffected (e.g. we could still talk in Discord normally and he had no internet issues whatsoever)


You are probably better off using something like Tailscale. You don’t need to expose your system with a reverse proxy then.
Especially because jellyfin is not designed to be on the Internet. There are several known unresolved security issues, and probably more unknown. I strongly recommend using a VPN for access.