Free DNS management service | Hacker News Reader

Free DNS management service

entrydns.net

67 pointssorich8735 comments

I'm not sure I'd trust something as mission-critical as DNS to a business which doesn't appear to have a viable business plan.

I noticed you're suggesting the freemium route - any details on how that's planning to work? Buying more record slots? Restrict certain types of records? Free GApps/Heroku/AWS configuration, custom configurations cost?

I am not affiliated to that site. I just saw it somewhere (can't remember where) and thought HN would find it interesting. Hopefully the owners notice the traffic bump and come here to reply to the questions.

I agree. I use pointhq.com because they have a free version, but they also have a paid version if you plan to use it on more then 10 domains. I think this is the better route to go.

I went with Rackspace DNS, which is free and has no limits. There are many, many other options. I think Linode has a similar offering?

My favorite thus far has been http://dns.he.net. Hurricane Electric runs many free services and when the time comes, I will be paying for their paid services as well. TunnelBroker alone is fantastic and has saved me many hours.

On topic, I checked out EntryDNS when they first announced it on HN. Glad to see many improvements, such as including HTTPS support, AAAA records, etc. Great job!

Edit: as a suggestion, let me view DNS zones directly. That would be very helpful to some, and also eliminate the need to learn how to translate between different providers' UI's.

You have no idea how awesome this is.

I've been looking for a good, reliable, and fully-featured managed DNS literally for the last 2 weeks straight (I'm tired of the default managed offerings from Rackspace, they are pretty bare-bones). None (free or paid) I've found have impressed me.

I've taken Hurricane Electric's IPv6 certification courses, used their Tunnel broker services, and I implicitly trust their tech. They really know what they're doing and their services are complete, well-managed, and work great. I will also gladly pay for their offerings if they move in that direction.

For those of you who haven't been introduced to Hurricane, please visit the site above and explore it. I highly recommend the IPv6 certification as a way to introduce yourself to IPv6 concepts, and the tunnel broker service as a way to set your own sites and clients up to use it before you have available infrastructure from your ISP or host.

Thank you very much, this is great news indeed.

Yes, HE's only limit is something like 50 zones, which for my projects is plenty. Their interface is solid and simple to use, and they support reverse DNS as well. Also, their support for these free products rocks. I haven't had support that great for any SaaS/PaaS out there, ever. They respond very quickly and actually know what they are talking about.

So far I've found only two issues: (1) no support for DNSSEC and (2) their use of HTTPS is somewhat spotty, so you must pay attention to it yourself.

Glad you found what you were looking for, and thanks for plugging TunnelBroker. The more people use services like these, the more IPv6 we'll be seeing.

Edit: I take it back. Looks like they always use HTTPS. It's tunnelbroker.net and tunnelbroker.com that don't.

I don't get it, they say they're filling a niche, yet pretty much every registrar offers DNS tools for free anyway (after all, you bought a domain from them) and there are a number of free dynamic DNS services out there too.

Unless I'm overlooking some killer feature, this is a typical case of a startup not reviewing their market before hand.

A cautionary tale: I had good luck with ZoneEdit when they launched. It was/is kind of in the same space as this. Their new UI is okay, but yours looks a bit better. They started out with freemium, but eventually had to re-structure how their premium service worked, and in the process crippled how the free service worked. It got bad enough that I abandoned them.

Be very careful how you structure your premium offerings. People don't like when the free version starts losing features or capacity.

Well the SSL certificate isn't valid so that's not a good start! I also use PointHQ.com and have been for about 2 and a half years now. Brilliant service. Built by the guys at aTech Media who make Codebase - http://codebasehq.com and a few more useful apps =]

Well the SSL certificate isn't valid so that's not a good start!

I think the certificate's valid, they're just not sending out a required intermediate certificate. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence though.

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=entrydns.net

Route 53 is not really expensive, if you have just a few important domain I would use a service with a 100% up record. DNS is just too important.

Agreed. We use it and it has been rock-solid, has a handy API, and a nice usable console that doesn't get in the way of someone who knows what they're doing.

The one bummer with Route53 is http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/#DNSSEC.

Well, http://zoneedit.com/ has been around for quite long now, that does this, and has a business model that seems to work?

Or http://dns.he.net

Works OK for me..

For smaller deployments (they have a 50 domain limit on the free accounts), Hurricane Electric DNS has been great. The business case is straightforward and they have top notch IPv6 support.

I am still using this to host DNS for some sites and its pretty good.

Does ZoneEdit still transmit your password in plain text. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2064531

Actually, ZoneEdit is owned by Dotster.

You need to state how many servers you have and where they are geographically.

Site is friendly but devoid of a technical FAQ

(it's also slightly confusing in that it's not just DNS management you are offering but actual authoritative DNS service)

These are your competitors, at least the commercial ones:

http://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/hosted-authoritative-...

These guys have been around for a long time: http://freedns.afraid.org/

It’s "made by geeks" but doesn’t support IPv6. I don’t buy that :-).

It does. You have to create a zone, then edit it and it lets you add all the records. Startled me at first too, as IPv6 is my current #1 requirement for a DNS provider.

Many round-robin DNS failover providers can afford to offer free DNS, though API access is a differentiator:

http://www.cloudflare.com/plans

http://www.dnshat.com/free-dns.html

etc.

namecheap does offer free dns, but an API controlled free DNS seems nice. The people who will likely need it are probably willing to pay $0.50 a month to amazon though.

Apart from hosting DNS myself (which I gave up on - not worth the effort), I have been using DNSMadeEasy - $30.00 for 10 domains is pretty good and they are rock solid.

While an interesting concept, I don't think I'd be willing to trust my internet lifeblood to a group that has yet to make a name for themselves.

I'll just continue to host my own DNS.

dnsmadeeasy.com - $30/year - anycast - Google for their uptime record.

or if your site isn't worth the $30 just use your registrar's free dns.

aTech Media has had Point free for a while. AFAIK it supports about the same features.

"Create an Account Now

It's free, sign up in 60 seconds"

Here's a free grammar correction for that comma splice:

"Create an Account Now

It's free. Sign up in 60 seconds"

i think DNSPOD.com is the best dns solution. and if you have 1k+ domains , dnspod.com is your only reasonable chioce.

Not sure how you can claim that when their non-free plans are listed as "Coming soon".

0 out of the top 1000 Alexa domains are using dnspod.com so...

The home page's latest blog post is from June 2011 and is titled "DNSPod.com is returning to normal". I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

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