There are other services which should work for you as well. I use one which never requires a regular check in. They even ofter a command line curl or other methods to send your updated IP to it. Think Home Assistant, via a curl or if you have a router with Freshtomator or other which supports such curl, it will work as well.

https://freemyip.com/

I’ve been using them for a few years now and never ever had an issue with uptime or otherwise. My use is just as a backup in the event my VPS goes down which hosts Pangolin (VPS).

Others such as noip.com and such do work well also.

I don’t use this software, but if you don’t mind a little local LLM (or a paid one if that’s your thing), this seems to be a pretty nice one:

https://www.getsubwave.com/

https://github.com/perminder-klair/subwave

It does use icecast for the back end.

I use the docker version of the Joplin Server, it syncs with everything I’ve thrown at it which is a laptop, my Android Phone(s) over the years and my Desktop with no issues. It’s super basic so you just set up an account in the self hosted server and then proceed to login using the Synchronization settings in your Joplin App.

If you have any existing data, Make sure to Back it up First!

This is my compose I use. Sub with your values obviously.

services:
    db:
        image: postgres:15.4-bullseye
        volumes:
            - /mnt/appdata/joplindb:/var/lib/postgresql/data
        ports:
            - "5432:5432"
        restart: unless-stopped
        environment:
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
            - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
            - POSTGRES_DB=joplin
    app:
        image: joplin/server:latest
        depends_on:
            - db
        ports:
            - "22300:22300"
        restart: unless-stopped
        environment:
            - APP_PORT=22300
            - APP_BASE_URL=https://public.url.example.com/
            - DB_CLIENT=pg
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
            - POSTGRES_DATABASE=joplin
            - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
            - POSTGRES_PORT=5432
            - POSTGRES_HOST=db
            - MAILER_ENABLED=1
            - MAILER_HOST=yourmailhost
            - MAILER_PORT=587
            - MAILER_SECURE=0
            - MAILER_AUTH_USER=Your Email user
            - MAILER_AUTH_PASSWORD=Your Super Secret Password
            - MAILER_NOREPLY_NAME=Your No Reply Name (eg:  Noreply box)
            - MAILER_NOREPLY_EMAIL=no reply email address
            - TZ=America/Los_Angeles 
volumes:
  joplindb:

And then in the settings for the sync in the app:

To get there, Go to the Tools > Options > Synchronization

Hopefully this will help. :)

You ask how people handle how many adds are shoved when using their devices. I think it’s due to the slow immersion into them over the years. Early web was mostly banner ads which became flashy and distracting. It started around that time and people being people, most just never really thought different as that’s the way the WWW is.

For those of us who run adblockers or use an ad-blocking DNS, and have done so for many years, it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web. (Most commonly when installing an new OS and not yet setting up the DNS) Some people are happy with them as every search engine ad link they click works and they go about their merry way.