IP Camera not working, not able to access via Internet outside - Cause and solution

We often have issue with our vstarcam IP camera, when either my wife or myself not able to see anything on our IP camera. Most of the time issue with accessing the camera itself. This is very frustrating, so I though to summarize some of the things, which can go wrong and has created issues in our case. Since we can not install vstarcam application in our office computers, we either use our iPhone or Android phone to access vstarcam IP camera and monitor our home, mainly to see how our baby is doing. Some time we also access our vstarcam camera directly using browser by selecting option four, access via smartphone browsers, which doesn't require any other application to be installed. Now following are couple of things, which has created issues in past related to working of our IP camera.

3 reasons for IP camera not accessible from outside via internet

1) If you are using DDNS, also known as Dynamic DNS Service, than you are bound to face this problem. Since DDNS is used to associate a fixed domain name with a dynamic IP address, Whenever, your DHCP Server changes the IP address for your IP Camera DNS, ISP has to refresh it's DNS table. Since most of the Internet Service Provider around the world doesn't refresh there DNS data often enough to capture this change in real time. This means, you will not be able to access your IP camera over internet if your DHCP Server changes the IP address, but ISP still pointing to old IP address. This problem will not last longer, because sooner or later ISP will refresh there DNS data and start pointing to right IP address.

2) As I said most of the time, we are not able to access IP camera because of host not reachable. Since we are using company's inbuilt DDNS server, if that has any issue or if that is down, we just can not access our camera. You ca not do anything on this issue, except to wait for server to come up. Usually these issue resolved in same day in couple of hours. One solution of this could be setting up your own DNS, but with wireless router with dynamic IP, this can be a tricky thing. I still don't know how to do that, but going to learn it soon, because this issue is keep occurring now and then.

3) When you can access your camera, sometime browser also caches IP of camera and since IP can change dynamically, this can cause impression that server is down. Best thing to do in this case is clear your internet history and access your camera by using DNS name e.g. sever URL. This issue also occurs if you try to access your IP camera by bookmarks, which may point to your older IP address.

4) This reason may sound funny but it happened to us, when somehow camera is not getting power. I don't who exactly has removed power plug but we were not able to access our IP camera with this issue for whole day. Since we are in office, we could only asked our maid to switch on and off the camera, as this is the first thing we do, when we are not able to access our IP camera. Because power plug was not inserted at camera end, it's got unnoticed, until we came to house and check the camera. So next time, your camera is not working be sure to ask someone to check power cable at both end i.e. on socket end as well as on camera end. By the this issue can be easily identified because green light on your vstarcam IP camera is not visible and it also doesn't blink.

That's all guys, these were some of the common reasons of vstarcam IP camera not working in our case. I am making this list of issues and solution to keep track of things and also update with latest information and better solution in future. If you have face any issue or know more about above mentioned reasons of IP camera not working then please share your experience with us.