Zeit.world: free global DNS | Hacker News Reader

Zeit.world: free global DNS

zeit.world

34 pointsTheCoreh14 comments

The post title and linked page don't make it obvious that this isn't a standalone service; it's a feature of their "now" hosting service. So you can't use it for your app unless you host it with "now".

"now" has a free, highly limited tier for open source projects, but their standard tier is $15/month.

We've been getting lots of great feedback and usage on our OSS tier. Improvements are coming. Many of the limits are in place to prevent abuse.

I think the worst part is limiting the number of deployments you can do per month.

> 20 FREE deploys per month

This isn't good. I think the latest meta is that We want people to deploy early and deploy often. If something escapes code review (which lets face it: we make mistakes and is probably just two or more "Looks Good To Me") we want to catch it and deploy a fix as quickly as possible.

Do deploys really cost that much in terms of compute resources for you? Or is it just an arbitrary differentiator?

The title is misleading. It's not a DNS service, but a node.js hosting platform similar to Heroku.

Custom domain is not included in the free tier: https://zeit.co/now#pricing

If you're on a paid plan, you'll get Geo-DNS for "free".

But what's the catch?

Co-founder of ▲ZEIT here. There's no catch. If you deploy with https://zeit.co/now, DNS is free.

Here's a little .gif showing the entire process if you're curious: https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/746093788272037888.

How are you going to make money?

We charge individuals and teams according to their growing capacity needs (number of deployments, bandwidth, storage, etc).

Check out https://zeit.co/now#pricing.

I'd guess thats what they were asking about when they said "what's the catch?"

Thanks, I like that you are supporting open source with a free dedicated plan.

Pretty confused. You said there was no catch, but it looks to have pretty low caps on bandwidth and number of monthly deployments, among other things.

It still looks like a really interesting product, but it seems disingenuous to say there's no catch when clearly it's not totally free.

How are you planning to fund this long-term?

Please see my reply above.

now alias [my id] [my domain].com ⏎ > [my domain].com is a custom domain. > Verifying the DNS settings for [my domain].com (see https://zeit.world for help) > Detected zeit.world nameservers! Configuring records. > Error! Custom domains are only enabled for premium accounts. Please upgrade at https://zeit.co/account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com