Hi everyone
Thanks for all the advice on buying a domain. Its a big week for me. Getting on grapheneos, buying a domain, and I also recently started self hosting my contacts and calendar. I love this way of life.
My original plan was to one of the xyz 1.1111b domains for $1 a year but most of the feedback I got said just go with cloudflare. Its a lot more money than I had planned but all the security features are baked in and I feel that’s worth the extra money.
Here are my questions. I use the latest version of truenas community
- How do I connect my domain to my server apps? I’ve got a series of apps I’d love to he able to access without tailscale and solely use the domain.
- I have heard the term DNS a million times but don’t really understand it. What do.I need to know about DNS to keep security up and stay protected
- I’d like to let family access my media server, are there any considerations I need to make?
- How can I use one domain to access multiple services on my server? Do I need to pay extra for subdomains?
Thank you for any advice


A single wildcard CNAME that points to your domains A record is easier to manage I would say. This comes handy when you add a new service to your stack, as you dont have to go and make a new subdomain record.
You already seem to manage all subdomain updates with that script, so it won’t help you much with dyndns. That is, unless you hit a rate limit when trying to update a very large amount of records at once.
Keeping separate TLS certificates is a separate topic from having a single wildcard CNAME record. Separate TLS certificates offer a slight security advantage over a wildcard cert, as a single leaked certificate secret wont compromize the rest of your sites.