"This is dumb"

I get it

Before I go further, let’s discuss the key scope of what I want Synclias to do:

Provide a method where my home network automatically adjusts and routes some sites over a VPN with minimal steps for me

It most definitely does not:

• Provide a guarantee that traffic won’t miss the VPN tunnel and I’ll get the site designed for my country
• Provide any way of routing torrent etc clients, if you want that, dedicate an IP, and use it as a source for your VPN boxes

Let’s term a site not getting routed over the VPN as a “Miss”, and there are a lot of scenarios that this could realistically cause Misses:

1. The big one - a site moves IP, and Synclias doesn’t catch it before a client get there
2. Round Robin load balancing using IP addresses
3. Short TTL’s make the IP capture process irrelevant after 5 minutes

Essentially, these are pretty much the same thing - a site moves IP or gets a different IP back from a DNS query after Synclias sets up the alias entry, and before it re-syncs.

Having said that, let’s look at some real world data here, my working theory, from having done web hosting for years, is that sites don’t move IP that often, mainly because there are far easier alternatives to doing so. ( Mainly because TTLs exist, which is a blessing to me and a curse to quick migrations.)

With things like blue/green deployments, Anycast, Elastic IPs etc it’s far more common these days for your external IP to stay the same, but use a device behind it to manage the traffic migrations rather than DNS, because:

1. There’s far more granular control options than DNS provides
2. DNS propagation exists
3. TTLs generally don’t come into it (which is essentially 2, but slight different)

It’s far easier to migrate a site these days than by using DNS to do so, and the cost of a DNS screw up isn’t just that you need to roll it back, you need to wait for propagation etc, which means unreliability for your site for longer than necessary.

As such, the only real time anyone changes IP address is when the easier options aren’t available.

So, let’s look at some data here:

Using - DNS History

Here’s some records:

discord.gg - has had the same 5 records since 2022 i.imgur.com - has moved IP once in 2025, and before that moved once in 2024 The big “p….hub” site has had the same IP since 2022

I fully understand that migrations do happen, there will be misses, but for most sites, migrations of IP addresses are relatively rare these days, and I’m willing to take a few misses.

We’re all playing by the rules of the internet, I’ve made sure I’m inside them, but doing what I can to maximise my chances of avoiding misses.