<p>After moving to the new place, I realized that my website kept going down every other day. This immediately struck my interest as my IP address kept changing. At first, I thought it was a trigger-happy housemate restarting the Internet connection every time the average ping deviated by a few milliseconds. After configuring my A records for like the third time, I felt it was time to investigate.</p>
<p>After a couple times of Googling, it turns out that the ISP at this new place is a smaller ISP. This ISP rotates the IP address every couple of days. So how would the laborious process of identifying my IP address, and then updating my A records be inevitable? Turns out not.</p>
<p>The solution was to use Dynamic DNS, which actively updates my A records with my registrar. To do so, I had to install ddclient on my Debian install. However, the available ddclient on Debian Stretch was rather out of date. Getting the newer version was a simple affair of adding Buster's Unstable repos, then enabling it to start during boot. But wait, isn't Debian Buster already in stable? Turns out I had already configured ddclient some time ago prior moving to this new place, a time where Buster was still brewing in Unstable. What a pleasant surprise when I fired up sources.list.d only to find that everything was already there. Thank you, past self. </p>
<h2>If ddclient was already configured, why would I still have issues with a IP address?</h2>
<p> After a bit of sleuthing, it turns out that I had to enable Dynamic DNS with my registrar, Namecheap. I had to also change my A records to what Namecheap calls A+ Dynamic DNS Records. With my A+ Dynamic DNS Records ready and ddclient's configuration double checked, I hesitantly left my server to its own devices.</p>
<p>It has been almost two weeks since that day, and everything is working fine. No downtime, no more stressful hours worrying about my server as I was stranded at work. What a relief. Well that's all I have to write for this post. Thanks for reading.</p>
