What am I talking about?

I’m talking about technology that lets you connect to your home or other computer remotely.  Most internet service providers assign you what’s called a dynamic internet protocol (IP) address.  What that means is that the IP address of your home computer changes from time to time.

This webtool that I’m going to tell you about today, is called No-IP dynamic DNS.  It’s a pretty neat tool, and let me tell you why.

Say you’re at a hotel away from home, or you’re at work and you need to get something from your home computer.  Assuming that the computer is turned on, how do you access your home computer remotely?

Well, for one, you’d need to know the IP address of the computer.  I won’t get into the other details, but suffice it to say that home IP addresses are dynamic, so they change on a regular basis.  How regular depends on your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

This is where No-IP comes in.

What they do, is that they provide a domain name that you can use for your home computer.  So instead of having to remember 169.254.23.258, you only have to rememeber something like http://yourname.no-ip.com/. Where “yourname” is the username that you got for yourself.

The best part, is that unlike your dynamically assigned IP address, the IP name never changes, so you don’t have to keep memorizing or keeing track of new names.

Pretty neat if you ask me.

No-IP has several levels of service, ranging from a very basic free version on up.  Go to their site and check out their pricing.