So, been thinking of setting up a Linux server at home. Nothing fancy, just something to tinker with.
Thinking about accessing it from the outside but my Internet isn't too steady these days - I think it's mainly down to the council doing electrical work last year and now I network through the power (because they cut my cable heading from my room to the router which can't be replaced).
Looking at the website for no-ip and not sure if it'll be what I want to ensure I don't lose access.
I think some people here (Ant?) have used it in the past, any words of wisdom or tea?

I was using no-ip until recently when I paid £5 for Plusnet to give me a static IP.

Think I'd been using it for a couple of years with no issues. With the free account you need to verify you still want use the account every month, just a link in an email and an I'm not a robot button.

I think you can setup a Pi to update no-ip when your IP changes, but couldn't get that to work for some reason. I was using the settings on DD-WRT to do it instead.

I use their free option for an OwnCloud server. Been running it for a couple of years through various upgrades, router changes and reconfigures, and a couple of internet losses. No-ip has always been absolutely fine. I can access my server (which is also a Raspberry Pi) connected wirelessly to the router from anywhere without problems. I connected from a cafe's wifi in Venice at the weekend and dumped some photos from my phone without a hitch.

They don't hassle you apart from the monthly email to confirm that you want to keep the account which is just a couple of clicks. Oh, every couple of months they send out some advertising for their other services but it's pretty low key and there's never any pressure.

Used it for many years, but eventually forgot to do the monthly manual updates and lost my addresses, but I wasn't really using them anyway.

If you don't have a static IP, or just want something easier to remember then it is definitely ideal. Usual method is to install either their software or some other software to update the IP the noip address is pointing to, making sure you can still access the server when needed. As Chrisssss mentioned, some routers can also do it.

Cheers, everyone!
Was thinking of going paid but seems like the free service will be fine.
Now to get a new HD for my server and then get tinkering.

Interesting. I'll have to think about whether this is something I would actually ever use, or yet another futzy tech gewgaw I can live without.

If you want access to your home server or computer or whatever at home, whilst not at home, it's useful. Saves remembering IPs and avoids the issue of the IP changing if it's dynamic.

If you own your own domain you can use a free service like afraid freedns to run the dns for your domain, then add a subdomain that points to your home IP. You can then also update that dynamically to reflect IP changes.

I think there's other similar services available but afraid worked fine for me so didn't try others.

So you could have
smiffy.com pointing at your website
home.smiffy.com pointing at your home server

Yeah I get all that, and I can see where it would be very useful for many people.

I probably don't need it and, in view of the daily bot hammering on work server http and ssh ports, it's not something I would open up on a whim.

Cloudflare provide free DNS hosting.

They don't have a client application to update for you, but they do provide a Restful HTTP API and SDKs for PHP, Python, Go, JavaScript and a few more if you also fancy a coding challenge.