TL;DR - DynDNS is getting rid of all it’s free accounts. The basic account is now $25 a year.
Man… It seems like all the best stuff is costing you nowadays. Good thing No-IP is still an option.
I switched from the free account to pro a couple years ago. I got sick of trying to remember to log in every 30 days. At that time, they had a 2 years for $40 deal. Since I use it to check my dvr and doggiecam, it was worth it to me. Having the connector built into my router does make it nice and seamless.
I use freedns.afraid.org for a dynamic DNS. I use an updater program on my primary desktop to update that with my home IP, then I have a record with my hosted domain name that points to that dynamic domain. I should see if my hosting provider supports remote updating of DNS records or not.
Yeah, you could see the writing on the wall for this a few years back as they slowly started making their services less and less attractive for hobbyists. I’ve found both ChangeIP and No-IP entirely reasonable alternatives for generic dynamic DNS. I was using Zerigo for dynamic DNS for my own domain, but they pushed their prices through the roof. I’ve since switched to Amazon’s Route 53 and the annual cost is a fraction of what any of the paid generic dynamic DNS services cost, plus I can do dynamic updates directly.
Yep, Route 53 fo’ life—I use it for the CoG, bigdinosaur.org, and my little .us domain for link shortening. Costs me about $2/month for 3 domains + my prorated number of queries.
There are plenty of other options, though—along with the ones mentioned in the thread, Afraid.org also comes up a lot. Also, Cloudflare has a free DNS/DDNS service, though you have to wrangle your way through their signup process.