I have been using no-ip for around two years to remotely access my hosted service, I mostly use their free service except for a few 5 months offers I bought.
Recently, I received a full year offer in email for 8$ (COUPON CODE: MAY8), and I was wondering whether to get that or buy a 2 years domain for the same price (FROM hostinger or namecheap).
I have never bought a doamain before and my knowledge is limited to what I mostly read here. So, per your opinion, what would be better in term of usability and security, a DDNS on the router and a port open per hosted-service? or a domain with reverse proxy?
I second that. This practice comes from a time where domain names were expensive, in many ways: SNI didn’t exist/wasn’t wide-spread, so each domain name on HTTPS needed a dedicated IP, Certificates weren’t democratized yet via letsencrypt/acme and most hosts were big enough to run multiple services, because virtualization wasn’t as widely available yet. So putting apps on sub-paths made sense.
Now all of those things are basically dealt with and putting each app on its own sub-domain just makes way more sense.