I switched to a paid domain in the last few months and regret not doing it sooner - it just works, and it’s nice knowing that I won’t have to reconfigure all my stuff to point at a different domain name again in the future. Price was maybe $15/year on porkbun - very much worth it imo.

I’ve also used freedns in the past and had no complaints about them, except that I think wildcard subdomains are limited to paid supporters (very cheap though) and at the time my SWAG docker image maybe didn’t support them? It’s been a while. The service was great though. Never had problems like I did with duckdns.

Same here. Mullvad’s awful policy that essentially limits you to having their client installed on 5 machines was also a deal breaker for me. Sure I could have fucked around with managing keys/connections myself, but why bother? I emailed their support about how inconvenient it was, and they told me I was free to pound sand or pay them for another subscription to enjoy the convenience of having their client installed on more devices.

Proton has been great since I switched, and I see no reason to use Mullvad these days.

Question - if your domain registrar has an API to update your A/AAAA records, and your router (or other home server) lets you easily update those records via the API when your public IP changes, is there a benefit to using freedns or any other DDNS service? It seems like you don’t really need them if you own a domain.

Yes, it’s why I stopped using DuckDNS and decided to buy my own domain. I used Porkbun and got a cheap one (~$15/year?). It was super easy, and DNS results are lightning fast now; no timeouts/errors/etc. like when I was using DuckDNS.

My router supports Porkbun for DDNS; it handles updating the A/AAAA records for my domain when my IP changes, but if your router doesn’t have that option, I’m sure there’s a script you could run on a PC or Raspberry Pi, etc. to handle that for you.

I honestly don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner! I’ve changed DDNS providers a few times over the years and it’s always a pain to update everything that references the old names. It’s great having peace of mind knowing that I own the domain now and won’t have to change again (even if I wanted to leave Porkbun, I could just transfer the domain registration to any number of good alternatives and not have to change my domain name).