The Downside of No-IP Free

Recently, we had a user complain on our Facebook page about not being able to share his free No-IP Hostname with his friends on Facebook. His hostname was something like gameserver.no-ip.org. Facebook thought he was posting spam.  This is one of the downsides of our No-IP Free and Enhanced service. So, why does this happen?

No-IP Free Dynamic DNS and Enhanced DNS users share roughly 50 different domains. With these services, you are relying on millions of other people doing the right thing with their hosts, which unfortunately isn’t always the case. Our service sometimes fall prey to cyberscammers and spammers. They create a hostname, and then send out spam on it. Our abuse team is amazing and they are usually pretty quick to shut them down. But because we have a history of this type of abuse on our domains, Facebook and other websites don’t like when people share our links.

So, because of a few bad  people it punishes everyone? Yup. Isn’t that life though?
There is nothing that we can really do about it either, aside from shutting down our Free and Enhanced service or simply deterring these scammers by moving to a paid model. Don’t worry though, we aren’t going to do that. Just be aware that when you are using our shared domain services, you may have trouble sharing and posting content…

Our shared domains are a great choice for someone that wants to run a small video game server, reach their computer remotely, or view a webcam over the internet, but if you are going to be using your domain for something a little more important than that like say, run a blog, website, etc, you may want to think about registering your own domain name and using the hostnames on it.   With No-IP Plus DNS, you register your very own domain (www.yourname.com or www.yourbusiness.com) and we handle the DNS for you!

If you believe the actions of one of our users violates our Terms of Service, help us out by emailing Abuse@no-ip.com.

12 Comments.
  1. aaaalo

    LOL, so your solution to most of your domains being blacklisted is… make your free clients pay!

  2. Z81ComputerVet

    I do believe aaaalo is missing the point of the message. No-IP is not making anybody do anything. What they are doing a a proactive and collaborative action that informs the FREE users of the unfortunate manner that their very useful service is being abused. They expressed their attempts to address this issue for their FREE users, but there is nothing No-IP can do about other companies decisions on how they mnanage their computer systems. Free means ‘No Money’, it does not mean ‘No Cost’ The cost of a free Domain Name service that finds your dynamic IP address is a great feature that I use everyday. I have never paid a single penny to No-IP and I have no problem using the ‘FREE’ products they offer in the manner that is acceptable in today’s vast and untamed internet. My thanks to No-IP for providing such a wonderful sevice.

  3. Mike

    I really appreciate your free service. I am heading out on holiday tomorrow, and will use it to remote to my machine at home no matter what my isp does with my ip! Thanks no-ip!

  4. Nuno

    Yeah, im one of the free users that made the jump to a paid service. 25 bucks a year, its less than 7 cents a day and i can have my own hostnames, in my own domain. email is pointed to gmail, so im VERY VERY happy with it! Thanks no-ip!

  5. Leo

    I agree with Z81ComputerVet on this. I think that the real problem is facebook treating the links as SPAM. *.no-ip.com domains should be treatly diferently from normal domains, but that is facebooks problem.
    NO-IP provide us an amazing service. Thank you guys for your amazing work (and sorry for my bad english).

  6. I love when people complain about a product they get for free. It makes me laugh so hard my gut hurts. But no really on a serious note is the first poster serious? Lol

    No-ip is purely full of win. I have used them for many years. Im probably one of their first users ever. These guys provide an amazing free product and it should be common sense that anything obtained for free will be abused by con artists and crooks all around.

  7. mueli

    Z81ComputerVet,
    Aggreed.

  8. Joe

    If “it” hurts when you do something, don’t do that. If you car gets terrible mileage with certain brands of gas/oil, don’t use it. If you don’t like a website, there’s that big X in the upper right corner. If you don’t like No-Ip’s services the way they are outlined in the TOS, the solution is simple. Don’t use them.

  9. AirborneAirAssault

    First off No-ip is the best free service of its kind and I am a paid user now since I needed the additional features. The first poster is the kind of person that screws things up for everybody. If you don’t like something…don’t use it. Being my line of work is to uphold and defend the democracy and freedom we have, just be happy you have freedom of choice. Keep up the great service No-ip as you have me as a lifetime customer! HoooAH! Army Veteran for 29+yrs and still serving.

  10. stealth-elf

    There are always the ungrateful whingers like the bad-mannered first commenter here, ‘aaaalo’. You see them around on the forums, grabbing what they can for nothing, then complaining because it might not be 100% perfect. As far as i’m concerned, they can just be ignored. I find No-Ip’s free service very handy and some friends of mine appreciate it, too.

    Thanks guys!

  11. Dave

    To be honest, if your abuse team was doing an effective job, your domain names wouldn’t have such a bad reputation with services such as Facebook. Surely you should be more concerned about the reputation of your own service?

  12. Ben

    This problem cannot be solved by NO-IP. It’s physically impossible for NO-IP to control Facebook’s filtering/blocking software.

    You need to complain to Facebook admin and explain the situation: They need to be filtering more selectively with no-ip.com addresses.

    Instead of blocking all subdomains of no-ip.com, they need to be blocking on the third level of bad site names: scammersite.no-ip.com, not *.no-ip.com.

    But, it’s Facebook, so they will probably just ignore you. But it’s worth a try.

    Even better solution: Don’t use Facebook. (It’s a trap!)

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