In my daily life, besides working as a Software developer, I'm always interested into launching new personal/side-projects. I launch simple webs, tools, try new technologies or make utilities for myself.
But how to make this projects available on the public internet?
In order to make that developments accesible anywhere I usually go and use No-IP services, which allows a single user to register three subdomains which can be dynamically updated if we don't have a static IP (DDNS). This has been specially useful for me when looking to expose an app deployed in my local network (home), normally on a Raspberry Pi.
This was until last week, that I discovered the FreeDNS service when accessing a mooo.com subdomain. The project has been there since 2001 up to this day... it's advertisement free and based on open-source software.
Currently they have a pool of 61,949 domains some of them working for more than 10 years...
They offer a premium account which offers more than 50 subdomains and "extra configuration". But a standard account allows you to create 5 subdomains in shared domains which I find more than useful for publishing my projects.
If you want, you can read the FAQs of the service in order to view all possibilities.
To contribute to this project I shared publicly the developer.li domain (which I was not using...), initially focused for developers, so anybody can create their own subdomain for their side projects, or its own place!
For the main page of my shared domain I made this simple Angular page, which allows you to check for available subdomains. All with the NES.CSS style which I fell in love.
Check it out!
piraces
/
developer.li
Main repo for developer.li website
Repo for the developer.li website.
developer.li offers free subdomains for developers, powered by FreeDNS.
The main site is made using the NES-style CSS Framework and Angular. It offers a simple check tool for available subdomains and a short tutorial about how to get started.
Contributing
Please feel free to contribute to this project in any way you want: open an issue, submit your own PR or propose a functionality.
License
MIT
Do you know any similar alternatives? What do you think about FreeDNS?
Happy coding!
Oldest comments (9)
Be aware that when using a shared domain that it can get difficult to impossible to use LetsEncrypt certificates, as they will limit the amount of certificates that can be requested by one domain. So when you use one of those shared domains with over thousands of users, you'll most certainly never host on HTTPS with LetsEncrypt.
Good point. That's very important...
Thank you for the information.
True. I'd recommend using free services like GitHub Pages or Netlify to host using SSL with these subdomains. That only works for static sites though, of course.
Personally I just went ahead and bought my own 'side-projects' domain for like $15 on Route53 (jhadik307.com) and now any projects I build I just setup as subdomains of it (project-a.jhadik307.com / project-b.jhadik307.com.) Not sure what the limitations of this setup are but so far it's worked out well for me.
I use freenom.com that allows registering domains up to 1 year for free.
Good one! I didn’t knew about it...
You can always use nip.io for this without having to sign up to any site or configure anything.
If your web host has an IP address of 42.42.42.42 you can get a proper hostname by going to 42.42.42.42.nip.io and if you need subdomains you would just goto example.42.42.42.42.nip.io.
You could even configure Let's Encrypt to work with it if you wanted to, but you're sharing the rate limit for everyone on nip.io.
I wrote about nip.io and other useful tools for local subdomains / etc. at nickjanetakis.com/blog/ngrok-lvhme....
Very cool, developer.li is a great domain for some projects :)
One alternative I know of is js.org, which is intended for JavaScript projects.
I used to use ieserver.net (running since 2001)
Now, I just dump everything onto it's own subdomain of my blog (akona.me)