Our global IP address (the IP address that points to your network to your home) is very important if we want access to things on our devices connected to our home networks. Each of your devices have a local IP address, which probably looks something like this … 192.168.xx This address is the local address and does nothing for us when we are outside of our network (that is connected to the Internet in our offices or at a friend’s).
What we want … is the global IP address. How can we find? Well, that’s the address of your ISP gives you and is probably sitting on your wireless or wired router in your house somewhere. To find out what your current IP address is global, you can go to a site like: whatismyipaddress. You will see the address to the top of this page. Mine looks like 122.22.x.x.
This will tell you that your IP address is global. So now you can access things via the Internet to your home network. You will probably need to configure port forwarding in your router to allow communication to pass through the server software and applications you have running on your PC or Mac at home. Search my site on how to configure port forwarding.
Ok, so what’s all this talk of dynamic DNS service?
Well, the problem most people have is that their IP is constantly changing world, this is called a dynamic IP address service. Most DSL and optical fiber line services means that consumers pay to come with a dynamic IP address, that they change from time to time. If you want, you can of course pay for the upgrade or simply request a free change (depending on supplier) to a static IP address service. This would solve the problem of changing IP addresses. Fortunately, there are companies out there offering a solution for us average consumers with a dynamic IP address.