PTRDNS - Free authoritative DNS hosting
Hello LES members,
I operate a managed authoritative DNS hosting provider called PTRDNS, and I've added a free plan intended for home labs and low-traffic personal domains.
Specifications
- 1 DNS zone, it can be primary (AXFR outbound possible to other providers), secondary (AXFR inbound from other providers), or hosted on PTRDNS' nameservers only
- Unlimited records
- 200K monthly queries
- TTL as low as 120s
- Dynamic DNS (RFC 2136)
- DNSSEC
- PowerDNS API support
What is PTRDNS?
PTRDNS is a managed authoritative DNS hosting provider built on standard protocols (AXFR, DNSSEC, DDNS), to offer a robust and inter-operable DNS service. Nameservers are spread across the world and are available on IPv4 and IPv6. Zones can be edited via a web interface and also managed with infrastructure-as-code tools thanks to the extensive support of the PowerDNS API.
For more informations: https://www.ptrdns.net/about/
Network and security: https://www.ptrdns.net/network/
FAQ: https://www.ptrdns.net/faq/
Why offer this free plan?
To get more people to try the service and maybe recommend it to others, to hopefully convert someone to a paid plan, to help test the service and improve it based on feedback from actual users.
How to get the free plan?
Create an account at https://app.ptrdns.net/signup and then click on the confirmation link in the email: you will find the free plan at the bottom of the page.
Limitations
- The payment platform (Chargebee) will ask for a credit card, even on the free plan. This is both a limitation in Chargebee and a way to make it easier for free plan customers to upgrade to a paid plan. Also, I couldn't justify coding a totally separate subscription flow for free plans...
- The nameserves are on unicast IP addresses, there's no anycast (yet).
- The number of free plan slots is intentionally limited to reserve resources and support to paying users, without which the service wouldn't exist.
What happens a domain goes over the query limit?
You'll get an email asking politely to either send less traffic (e.g. by increasing the TTLs) or to subscribe to a paid plan with higher limits. Repeated violations can result in the zone being suspended.