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Comment by samcrawford | Hacker News Reader

I've used ns1 for a few years, they've been great!

We used ns1 at my last job, they were indeed great to us. We moved from self-hosting DNS because the DNS servers would randomly become unresponsive and would start returning fake records. After switching to ns1 and getting our first bill, we realized that a lot of our network equipment apparently did a DNS lookup for every log line. This resulted in an exceedingly large bill, which ns1 happily reversed (we did fix our stuff ;).

I thought self-hosting DNS would be easy, since it is 40 year old tech now.

Even now, like you, I get the occasional (ie. once per year) named segfaults or it randomly stops responding over TCP.

Few SaaS products are less effort than one reboot per year, but still worth it IMO.

Since then I've started using CoreDNS, which does seem easier to monitor. (I don't know if it's faster or more reliable, but it has a lot of ways to figure out what's going wrong. As it turns out, DNS causes people a lot of trouble these days when they use it for service discovery, and their services discover each other hundreds of times a second. So that's why DNS servers grew APIs and observability features.)

Do you know what the reliability of their free plan is like?

I'm on their free plan and have never had an issue. They also send me warnings letting me know I'm at 50% of my free usage, which is a nice touch.

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