Static IP Address

depends on your service provider, you should call them, some give the option of static over dynamic

 

I think SBC and Roadrunner offer Static IPs for 5-10 bucks extra.

 

Yeah, depends on the ISP. Usually you'll pay a little more to get a static IP. Why do you want one?

 

I have Roadrunner and since my machines are on 24/7 my IP address has been the same for over a year. As long as you don't shut off your machine you don't need to worry. If you happen to turn off your machine, you can look into dynamic DNS services. Basically what they do is provide you a client you put on your machine. Every once in a while the client will access their server and let them know what your IP address is. If it is different than before, then it will update your DNS server (whoever is hosting your domain name) with the new IP. Works great too.

 

I'm guessing it's so he can "I want to be able to host from home or an office".

River, if you're finally thinking about setting up your Steve Francis p*rn server, be advised that if your provider detects you using a lot of bandwidth, they may shut you down or ask you to go to a business account (more expensive).

 

They are great for remoting into your home PC while at work and doing things you wouldn't normally get away with at work

 

One thing to keep in mind is that IP's are becoming scarce. It is less and less common for ISP's to provide static IP's and they are getting more expensive. Many web hosts require that you either purchase an IP or that whatever IP you want to use for a website must conform to certain needs - e-commerce, etc.

Funny problem...running out of numbers.

 

Why don't they just add some more digits to the ip system? Too many programs needs to be changed?

 

They're working on it, just takes a while to get everything updated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPV6

 

If 24/7 up to the minute availability is not important to you then I suggest you try a dynamic DNS service. DNS is what allows you to refer to hosts on the Internet by name. You type in a name (i.e. www.yourdomain.com) and DNS resolves that name to the correct PC's IP address. Normally you would need a static IP address to do this.

However, dynamic DNS allows you to do the same thing with a dynamic IP address. You register with a dynamic DNS service and install a special piece of software on your PC. That software will check your IP address on a regular basis and, if it ever changes, update the DNS server with the new IP address. If you tell the software to check your IP address every 5 minutes there may be a case where, for 4.5 minutes or so, your site is unavailable. I've been using dyndns.org for years and have never noticed a problem getting to my home pc.

There a many dynamic DNS services out there but I've had great success with dyndns.org. If you use one of their domain names the service is actually free (check out their Dynamic DNS service). If you want to register a real domain name name I believe they charge $15 to register the name (.com) and then $25 a year to host the DNS. If you already have a domain name then you would just pay $25 a year for them to host DNS.

Once again, I've never noticed any latency with my name resolution but it's certainly a possibility. With cable Internet and IP addresses that hardly ever change you will probably never notice.

With regard to the question of why don't they just extend the address space... they are. Right now 90% of the Internet is using IP v4 (with IP address that look like 192.168.1.10). Soon everyone is going to have to make the transition to IP v.6 (v.5 was apparently an experiment). An IP v.6 address looks something like FEC0::2AA:FF:FE3F:2A1C. Here is a link with more IP v6 info. Also, they've been saying "any day now" with regard to the tranisition and for a while it seemed imminent, however, with the advent of technologies like NAT and Proxy servers the depletion of the IP v4 address space was significantly put off.

 

I have also had good success with zoneedit .
The are reliable and free for most setups.