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Comment by zwischenzug | Hacker News Reader

Somebody pointed out to me that you can get a free DNS service here:

https://dns.he.net/

Good thing with Hurricane Electric's service is that they also provide slave DNS capability.

So you can run your own DNS master server and rely on HE for availability when your server is down or even give preference to the slave DNS, so your users can get the results quick.

Still good to go through the process of setting this up and making yourself less reliant on third parties.

Yes, totally agree. All the pain put the knowledge in my bones.

You're "less reliant", but chances are, you'll end up having worse reliability.

Why do you think that? There is nothing to prevent one from running two, three or four DNS servers each with different providers. The internet was designed to be decentralised and run in such a manor, no?

After dyndns.org decided to remove the free service, I was so pissed that I had to update all my devices including git checkouts etc.

So I decided not to go with any free providers anymore and get my own domain instead. So far no regret.

For anyone willing to take the risk, another 3rd party service currently free was promoted on HN 6 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14856277#14858784

>opie34: A friend and I put together a free dynamic DNS service [1] offering cool custom domains aimed at the Raspberry Pi community (and similar hardware hackers.) It's not strictly a hardware project, but it's a crucial building block for any network-enabled Raspberry Pi project, and we'd love your feedback.

[1]: https://www.legitdns.com

Why didn't you just pay dyndns? That's what I did.

It seems dyndns is €24 per year. My baremetal hosting (4 Dedicated ARM Cores, 2GB memory, 200Mbit/s Unmetered, 50GB HD) is €43.2 per year. I am not ready to pay more than €10 per year for a domain name. For the moment, I enjoy 3 free domain names from no-ip.org.

I use duckdns.org. They are free and simple.

Not TS, but I did pay dyn for several years.

The problem with them however was that they did rack up the price over time and not just a little bit.

In 2006, I had to pay $9.95 for their yearly "Pro" offering. In 2008 the deal became "only $23.00 for 2 years", humm OK. Two years later in 2010 it was "$30 for 2 years", in 2012 the bill became $40.00 and when 2016 came the price was upgraded again... (yet again without any other benefits from a customer point of view)

That's when I figured that it was too much and moved over to he.net. Which still is free and still works great for the dynamic DNS needed.

For static DNS services I also happen to run my own DNS servers, if needed then the he.net services could be moved over to their, but not seeing the need for now.

Once my annual maintenance exceeds what I would value my time at for 3-4 hours, then I may consider hosting my own DNS

Sorry that I wasn't clear. the DNS services for which I was using dyn for were moved over to he.net, which is also free and easy to use and has specific support for dynamic DNS.

The DNS servers that I happen to run have nothing to do with dyn's pricing, I was already running those and they are for more serious needs as just dynamic DNS.

First of all, I didn't like that move and did not want to reward it.

Next, I wanted to become independent. Now I can choose my DNS hoster or do it myself, but as long as I keep my domain the migration is easy. (And the custom domain looks much better ;-)

So I have no hard feelings against dyn.com as it was completely okay to stop their free service. Nevertheless, I did not want to be in the same situation again.

+1 for Hurricane Electric's free DNS. I ordered a .ninja domain, which they didn't support at the time. I contacted customer service, and they added it within a few hours. I love service when I have a problem!

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