Losing my dyndns account - pascal.selfip.org is no more

The problem:

After 9 years of using dyndns for free to avoid the high costs of renting a static IP (60 euros per year by my German provider "netcologne") to use my laptop at home as a server, dyndns.org now takes money for their dns service - about 25 $ a year. There are several reasons for me not to pay, and so I lost the control about the subdomain "pascal.selfip.org". There are not too many references in the internet to this domain, but I find it sad. Hate broken links. (All the URLs of that subdomain were valid through all these 9 years, I made this for sure).

The content formerly found at http://pascal.selfip.org/ can now be found at http://pascal.dr0i.de/ . This is a subdomain of the domain I have rent at selfhost , and with the renting of that domain I got a also a dyndns support at selfhost which I need to route to my server at home. And all this costs only 18 Euros . Also I was able to pay via German bank transfer action ("Überweisung") which is superior to any paypal or mastercard/visa etc. because of security and tracking reasons. This is also why I decided against paying the 25 $ , which I considerd to do otherwise (at least for one year, to give the domain the HTTP status code 301 . (Dyndns gave me that chance to redirect, but I always said to me "ok, will do that next week". I had to log in once a month at dyndns to keep the account alive. Now, for 3 months I logged in once a month, but the last time I missed it. So that was that and sad. Anyhow, even if I would have given the status code 301, only the search engines which hit in that time frame would know about the permanent redirect. All the broken links stored in webpages will somedays be just that - broken links. Worse, they could be "hijacked" by someone who takes that subdomain and fill in with whatever content))

Lesson learned:

Using a dynamic IP is ok, but not for publishing URIs for your content! If you do not control the domain, what if e.g. the tenant of that subdomain decides to take it away if he wishes so , for whatever reasons? You are defenceless. From that follows vice versa: do not ever link to content to subdomains if you are not sure if the corresponding domain is in control of the people who provide the content . So, my strong advice, use a dyndns subdomain solely for routing purpose in the CNAME of your DNS entry for your real domain to route to your home server. As for my domain dr0i.de I do just that - and the switching form dyndns.org to selfhost.de for dr0i.de to mimick an expensive static IP has no bad side effects like those forever broken links for pascal.selfip.org . And if selfhost.de for whatever reasons will be unbearable for me, I will held my domain and switch to another dynds provider or rent at least a static IP - however, I will not have headaches with broken links.

May the links always be stable!