The first issue can be mitigated using Managed DNS services, such as No-IP (noip.com) and Dyn (dyn.com), which provide a dynamic DNS service. These services will provide you with a hostname (for example, username.no-ip.info) and update the hostname's DNS A record to point to your machine's IP address (more on DNS records later). This means any requests destined for that hostname will arrive at your associated device. To make this work, you'd also have to install a client on your device, which frequently checks its own IP, and update the Managed DNS service whenever it changes.

The second issue can be mitigated by using port redirect, which is a service that most Managed DNS services also provide. First, just as before, you must download the client to update the Managed DNS service with your dynamic IP. Then, bind your application to listen on a port on your machine that is not blocked by your ISP. Lastly, you'd have to go to the Managed DNS service and redirect all traffic that arrives at the hostname to your device's specified port.

Dynamic DNS simply changes a DNS record; no application traffic actually arrives at the Managed DNS servers. On the other hand, with port redirect, the Managed DNS service acts as a proxy that redirects HTTP packets. If you'd like to try them out, No-IP provides a Free Dynamic DNS service, which you can sign up for at noip.com/free.

While having a dynamic IP and using a dynamic DNS is acceptable for personal use, it's nowhere near reliable enough to be used for enterprise. Your IP address can change at any time, and this can cause connections to drop and data to get lost. There will also be a bit of latency between when an IP address updates and when the Managed DNS provider is made aware of this change, and thus you can never achieve 100% uptime.

Businesses who host their own servers usually pay their ISP for a static IP and enhanced connection speeds. However, this can be costly. Take Comcast, the most popular and beloved broadband provider in the United States: their most basic consumer-grade offering, XFINITY Performance Internet, supports up to 60 Mbps download speed and costs $39.99 per month. However, for Comcast to assign you a static IP, you must subscribe to their business-grade plans. The most basic plan—Starter Internet—supports up to 25 Mbps speed, and costs $69.95 per month, or $89.90 if you'd want to include a static IP. This is just not cost-effective.

A better alternative is to register an account with a cloud provider and deploy our application on a VPS. A VPS is essentially a virtual machine (VM) that is connected to the internet and is allocated its own static IP address. In terms of costs, VPS can cost as low as $0.996 per month!