this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Own domain for Jellyfin and privacy concerns (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by dingleberrylover@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi everyone,

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)

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[–] stratself 1 points 4 days ago

First, I recommend telling your script to check whether the IP has changed before publishing a new one. This may alleviate some issues like ratelimits or confusion from your dynDNS provider.

Secondly, if the problem persists, you may wanna use another dynDNS provider and figure out their API. My recommendation is deSEC, and they have some client-side tools to auto-update the IP too.

Thirdly, you may wanna find out exactly why there are intermittent failures. Does your Jellyfin's public IP address changes often? If so, your DNS caches may have trouble updating to the new IP address, or the DNS provider doesn't have time to fully propagate its changes to the world wide web. nslookup yourdomain from those machines when the issue happens, and see what's up. Or maybe, the dynDNS server location is too far away from your country. causing DNS resolution to timeout and fail.

For your own domain part, well: you buy a domain through a registrar, and most of the time they also act as a DNS provider where you can update DNS records. dynDNS is just a set of tools to easily do this when you have changing IP addresses, and how it works depends on the DNS provider's API. If you understand their APIs, you can roll out your own script pretty quick. But buying a domain is usually unnecessary to fix DNS issues