Ask HN: Does truly private DNS hosting exist? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does truly private DNS hosting exist?

12 pointsNTroy13 comments

I've spent a long time attempting to find any managed DNS/DNS hosting providers that also guarantee privacy.

Does anyone on here know of any DNS hosting provider that can meet the following criteria?

Mandatory:

- The provider allows for the creation of all, standard DNS records

- The provider can guarantee no logging of DNS queries or a short retention period for those logs (or, if logs are kept, then they must not include the IP address from which the request originated)

- The provider allows DNS hosting for domains not necessarily registered through that same provider

Bonus Points:

- The provider has a large network of fast servers (potentially anycast DNS)

- The provider allows for some advanced options (for example "POOL Records," "Round Robin" DNS, or "Geo" DNS)

- The provider is relatively cost effective

Note: I'm not looking for private DNS providers. There are plenty of providers who offer DNS services for free or cheap, and have great privacy guarantees. I'm specifically looking for providers that will host your custom DNS records, and guarantee that all queries to those records are not logged. The few providers that I found who ran private DNS services and allowed for managed DNS still collected analytics when you hosted custom records, and did not allow for those analytics to be disabled.

If you know of any such services, I'd be super grateful if you could link them below, and/or share any experience you have with them. Thanks!

Tbh I think it's beyond reasonable to expect when you're paying for a service that your data (or your clients') isn't funneled into another sideline. And this particular question is great timing for me, so I hope you don't mind me doing a bit of market research and get your feedback on a few things.

- Is this for personal domains or commercial?

- Are the clients 'sensitive' or do you want to protect PII out of principle?

- Do you expect to pay a premium (compared to larger providers) for client privacy?

- For records that have a distribution strategy like round robin or balanced by load, do you expect a client to receive the same result on subsequent requests?

- Is it acceptable to keep (for a record's TTL) a hash the client's subnet and the response for the purposes of only returning consistent records, or do you consider this another flavour of tracking client IPs?

- How valuable are metrics/reporting do you? Is reporting query volume at the ASN or country level enough? Too much?

Thanks.

Sure!

- Both

- Both

- Yes. I wish that weren't the case, but considering that I can't find a single provider so far who respects end user privacy, I would expect for one who does so to charge more.

- No. Ideally, the provider wouldn't keep any logs, so they wouldn't be aware that the same client was making a subsequent request.

- I guess it's completely up to the provider. As this would be the first privacy-respecting provider, they'll probably have to go all-in with privacy, if they wish to gain traction and popularity within the community. So no, I'd personally hope that they wouldn't do that. However if this were an existing provider hoping to start becoming more private, yet they also have current customers for whom these features matter, then I guess workarounds like this are better than not being able to transition to better privacy in general. Or, even better, offer features like this for customers who need it, but allow them to be disabled from account settings for those who don't want it.

- To me, personally, I do not care at all about metrics. If a client is querying DNS, then it's because they're about to connect to one of my services (leaving cyberattacks out of the picture for the moment), at which point if I wanted to (which I don't) I could collect metrics. That being said, I don't think that, for those who want it, collecting generalized metrics at the country level, for example, would be unreasonable. And other metrics, such as DNS routing based on server "health checks" or number of resolution errors, etc. aren't bad either. It's just imperative that when the company collects these generalized metrics, they have a clear and perfect process of purging the metrics of all PII, and only saving the country name from which the request originated, for example.

No problem!

I really appreciate you taking the time to give feedback. It's great to hear from people that have a clear sense of their priorities.

Installing a DNS server (personal preference: nsd) on a virtual or dedicated rented box seems to fulfill your mandatory conditions. Did you mean to include something like "web interface" or "managed" in the criteria? What exactly is it that you expect of the "provider" here?

Yeah, currently I run my own DNS server. However, as traffic grows and so does your customer base and server locations, it would be nice to use a dedicated DNS provider, as they'll already have the infrastructure set up to handle a significant capacity of DNS resolutions quickly, as well as servers around the globe to do so efficiently. In addition to the speed, it's usually also less expensive than setting up and maintaining multiple DNS servers of your own around the world.

Anycast, gslb behavior, standard records, short logging, probably UltraDNS or maybe Dyn if you don't mind that Oracle purchased them. I don't know what you mean by cost effective. All the commercial providers can get expensive depending on how heavily requested your DNS records are. You would need to negotiate pricing. As for log retention, regardless of vendor that is something you would have to get them to put in writing in a mutually signed / counter-signed contract reviewed by your lawyers. Companies can say anything but it means nothing until it is in legal documents.

That's a good point. It wouldn't be the first time that providers (most notably VPN providers) have lied about their logging policies with devastating consequences for the end user while they get off scott free. Getting something in writing would be ideal, however I'm not sure I'm big enough yet to work out a custom deal like that with a major provider. Thank you for pointing that out, though.

For logging details in a contract, the size of your company does not matter. It's worth the 2 or 3 hours of time paid to a lawyer to get that right if it is important to you or the needs of your business. Where size matters is the discounted pricing. Just avoid getting locked into 3+ year contracts and you should be able to adjust the pricing as you grow your business.

Get a cheap VPS for a few bucks a months and "apt install bind9". You can create any kind of records you want, and have whatever logging you want.

Yeah, that's what I currently do. However as traffic grows in both volume and origin, and can be hard (and expensive) to keep up. That's why a privacy-respecting provider who already has the infrastructure would be ideal.

Unfortunately, every time you use a hosted service it's basically guaranteed you're not going to get any privacy (even if they claim otherwise, see: the amount of people who get v& using no-log vpn providers). Running it yourself is the only way to have certain guarantees about logs and whatnot.

Out of interest, what do you consider "relatively cost effective"?

A pricing scheme that isn't too far off of what you'd find from most other managed DNS providers. Obviously I wouldn't mind paying more for the "privacy" aspect, as long as the price isn't ridiculous. I don't have any, set numbers, however.

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