Hetzner Free DNS. Anyone using? I’m trying as Secondary DNS.

nqservices

Hi all,

I use Cloudns as primary dns provider, and I was looking for a Secondary DNS provider to have complete DNS redundancy in case Cloudns goes down.

And I found out that Hetzner offers both Free Primary and Secondary DNS service, even if you don’t have services hosted with them (in my case I have).

Their control panel is also cool: https://www.hetzner.com/dns-console

I have setup 1 Secondary DNS to test on a domain a few days ago, and until now, all seems to be working properly. When testing DNS response speed, it shows Hetzner DNS slower than Cloudns… but I was already expecting that.

Anyway, for now using Hetzner as Free Secondary DNS seems as good and reliable solution.

Anyone else is using Hetzner DNS? If yes, what’s your opinion about the service?

Also if anyone has any advice on a good and cheap Secondary DNS provider, please say.

bruh21

dns.he.net

themew

+1 dns.he.net works, has been extremely reliable and is free.

jar

@themew said:
+1 dns.he.net works, has been extremely reliable and is free.

If they don't detect your NS pointing to them they'll stop serving your zone. That's a good setup for a temporary failure at several levels.

Daniel15

Is it anycast or is it just based in Germany?

daffy

@Daniel15 said:
Is it anycast or is it just based in Germany?

No anycast. As far as I remember they have one in each of their German locations, and a third with MyLoc.

donli

Cloudflare free DNS

https://www.cloudflare.com/dns-x/

default

I never used Hetzner for DNS, but I trust them to provide a great service. I am only concerned about privacy of DNS queries, since this company is in Germany.

OhJohn

But this topic is about secondary dns, isn't it?

I tried all kind of secondary dns options already and find that all the ones I tried (also paid ones like dnsmadeeasy) are way too slow on reacting on a notify by the master/primary dns.

So if anyone here has an idea for a really good secondary dns provider, please tell.

And about Hetzner: they recently reworked their dns service, had a lot of bugs in the beginning, so while Hetzner is great in bare metal and cloud servers, I wouldn't use them for serious dns concerns.

(a good dns service needs global coverage with low latency, anycast preferred, and a good api).

daffy

@OhJohn said: too slow on reacting on a notify by the master/primary dns.

When I tried them last time it was within a few seconds after BIND sent the notify.
More than fast enough for Let's Encrypt to not bitch about it.

@OhJohn said: (a good dns service needs global coverage with low latency, anycast preferred, and a good api).

Depends on the target audience I'd say.
For me, my "clients" are in Scandinavia and an average user doesn't notice the difference between CF's servers in Oslo vs Hetzner in Germany f.ex.

OhJohn

@daffy Regarding:

"When I tried them last time it was within a few seconds after BIND sent the notify."

Are you talking about Hetzner DNS? So I'll have to try it again for local projects in nl/de/pl etc. where those ns locations should suffice. I do can imagine that the Hetzner dev team fixed all or almost all of those problems that surfaced in the first days of the relaunched service.

daffy

@OhJohn said:
@daffy Regarding:

"When I tried them last time it was within a few seconds after BIND sent the notify."

Are you talking about Hetzner DNS? So I'll have to try it again for local projects in nl/de/pl etc. where those ns locations should suffice. I do can imagine that the Hetzner dev team fixed all or almost all of those problems that surfaced in the first days of the relaunched service.

Yup.
I was using a Virtualmin server with BIND set up to notify Hetzners nameservers and when making changes to zones in Virtualmin the Hetzner nameservers were pretty much instantly updated as well. Works pretty neat (and for me personally I prefer them instead of using f.ex. CF).

Daniel15

@donli said: Cloudflare free DNS

You can only use Cloudflare for secondary DNS on paid enterprise plans: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001356152-Configuring-Secondary-DNS . Not available on free, pro ($20/month) or business ($200/month) plans

I spoke to their team about it and they said that they have no plans to offer secondary DNS on free plans, one of the reason being that it gives them a feature that differentiates the higher paid plans from the lower paid ones and the free ones. Makes sense from a business perspective, but enterprise plans are very expensive.

AFAIK when you use Cloudflare on a free account, you must use it for primary DNS (meaning you can only modify DNS entries through their web UI or API, not by replicating viaAXFR/IXFR from another DNS server), and can not use any secondary DNS servers other than theirs.