We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself

237 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by dabinat

73 Comments

Lucasoato

2 hours ago

Kudos to the BunnyNet team!

I've always looked for a EU based alternative to Cloudflare; not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company, but pushing for and testing EU services is important particularly in the light of recent developments in EU-US geopolitics.

The problem is that many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart. Consider Hetzner as an example: how can you imagine being competitive with US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) by raising the prices so much, in such a short time, with so little previous communication to your customers?

BunnyNet on the other hand is being competitive and this move is in the right direction. Of course their free tier is not comparable to Cloudflare (they are two different companies, with different profiles in terms of debt, cash in hand and so on), but it doesn't need to be for small projects.

I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.

1dom

3 minutes ago

> I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.

That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.

Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.

To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!

scandox

2 hours ago

Well that's a strange way of expressing competitiveness when Hetzner is still vastly cheaper than those 3 cloud providers, despite those cost increases.

jeremyjh

an hour ago

They are vastly cheaper even than their actual competition in the US like Digital Ocean.

edit:

Actually I had completely missed the most recent price update. I made this comment referring to April 1st pricing.

I did not receive a communication about the June 15th update, because it did not apply to existing resources.

I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.

For the CPX line - which are the shared/oversubscribed tier, there is a 12 EUR premium for hosting in Ashburn compared to Germany.

That is on top of increases that happened in April.

Imustaskforhelp

an hour ago

Yes Hetzner is still vastly cheaper option but there are better options now compared to hetzner and the issue is the way that they handled the pricing.

Its just simply unsustainable and burns a lot of trust/good will if you increase your prices 3x in such a short period of time

Trust me when I say this but Hetzner really belonged in its category previously. I had scoured almost everything and nothing could provide the scale at price Hetzner did back then but now I would say that its simply not true anymore and that there might be better options out there for what its worth.

I am really sad for Hetzner as I really enjoyed them and always wanted to build on top of them but looks like all good things come to an end :-(

heybales

42 minutes ago

Are you a Hetzner customer? I'm a Hetzner customer, and my prices did not increase by 3x (it was more like 1.25x) and the price increase was communicated months in advance and several times. I am running stuff on their older infra, so maybe they handled it differently? When hardwares price go up at least 4x for storage and ram, I don't see how you can avoid price increases and they are still one of the cheaper/cheapest options for what I need.

jeremyjh

a minute ago

It depends on the product.

I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.

khurs

23 minutes ago

>When hardwares price go up at least 4x for storage and ram, I don't see how you can avoid price increases

You said you are on older infra? So why did they increase your costs 1.25x?

That old hardware has long depreciated and paid itself back many times over and you run a higher risk of an outage due to components wearing out over time.

You should be asking for a discount!

AussieWog93

36 minutes ago

Certain things went up more severely than others. CPX VMs went up by close to 3x, for example, whereas CX VMs didn't. Which is strange, because the justification they gave was about RAM/Disk prices, not CPU.

Imustaskforhelp

14 minutes ago

My frugality had made me found cheaper options than Hetzner (at the cost of my sanity /jk)

But, hetzner was a really solid deal especially for larger specs, literally nothing could compete with it as I used to make literal lists of providers in my head that can compete against Hetzner/ovhcloud and there were none. They were so good, too good in fact and I had actually felt like they were so giant that they would be able to survive the ramflation and it would be the small shops who would be hurt the most but turns out that although yes small shops are hurt, even the largest of giants like Hetzner couldn't resist the Ramflation and were (forced?) for price increase whereas incredibly I have found small shops to still somehow be more resistant/competitive than the larger beasts.

Pardon me if I am wrong, which I usually am, but aren't there price differences between pre-existing customers and new customers as well, atleast if I am remembering it correctly.

@AussieWog93's comments also make sense in terms of somethings going up by 3x. There seems to be a general consensus online from my limited understanding that some if not many products have increased their prices quite substantially.

faverin

2 minutes ago

I'm a Hetzner customer and this year's price rises have been well communicated.

Everyone's prices have gone up and i checked if i could go elsewhere and they are still cheaper for their quality level. Deffo beat Digital Ocean and cloud overlords like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc for my needs.

I am particularly pleased they locked in my old hosting plan prices after the recent increase. Seems fair. New hardware has skyrocketed in cost so I don't see how you can avoid price increases.

chpatrick

an hour ago

Hetzner can't magically buy cheap hardware and prices have multiplied the last year.

Imustaskforhelp

an hour ago

I understand that and I am not denying that but it would be now unfair to say that Hetzner belongs in its own category as there are now other alternatives who do compete with Hetzner in its pricing, who also I suppose weren't able to magically buy cheap hardware but I suppose some of them might've lucked out with good deals beforehand and spare-capacity.

Overall I am unsure of how much of the thing was under Hetzner's control itself or not in terms of raising the prices given Ramflation but in deep part I am saddened by it rather than angry on the state of how the whole situation turned out to be, and I wish nothing but good for hetzner as they move past this ramflation and hopefully people are able to give a look at some smaller shops as well which are made of mostly lovely people as well.

I hope that more people look at smaller hosting providers in general who were previously unable to compete at the level of hetzner but now are actually able to do so. I recommend trying them out and talking with them and using it for atleast hobby projects and hopefully even serious projects as I know some hosting providers smaller in scale than Hetzner but are something on which I might feel as comfortable as Hetzner on deploying, if not a bit more because sadly for better or for worse Hetzner is quite strict in some aspects.

chpatrick

37 minutes ago

How are the smaller hosting providers going to buy cheap hardware?

Imustaskforhelp

23 minutes ago

some already have spare capacity, others have better contracts with their vendors and some can provide DDR3 and specialize in that type of ram and some providers are willing to eat the costs to be better competitive and that the future would be better, some are doing things for ideological reasons as they themselves don't wish to raise prices because they want to provide better for the customers (strange I know but I know of one provider who has said that)

Not everything is good though and some providers are in fact dead-pooling as well and shutting down or raising prices but not to the degree of 3 times. They don't have the leverage that Hetzner does and people would simply migrate but both Buyvm and netcup are notable examples of price increase at the levels of 18-20% for most usecases which was still comparatively high back when they were done but understandable because of ram crisis, which is why my understanding of hetzner's price increase stops being a little understandable.

Ram prices are already declining from its peak and its around 2028 when its mentioned to have a glut. So as easy as it is for me to say but the crisis is comparatively short and there have been other costs involved for hosting providers which is declining (cost of IPv4 is declining as AWS,Google and other giants have stopped hoarding/buying even more IPv4)

It's a tough space for hosting provider but I hope I have shown the how part of how they manage it, its not as easy as it was during the 2020's but it is managable with some smart price increases and other mechanisms or so I have heard. I have just recently bought a few 7$/yr vps's from such shared providers. They don't earn too much from the 7$/yr vps's as much as they earn from the word of mouth (TNAHosting ftw) and thinking of it as (amortizing?) advertisement costs.

Which is why considering all of this and the fact that I was a very massive Hetzner fan back in the day pre price increase, I have felt like the way Hetzner has done things just doesn't feel very Hetzner-y and that there were better ways to manage it and even if not, then there are better shops out there welcoming you, waiting for you to give them a shot as well. I have written another comment detailing some other MASSIVE list of providers as well if this interests ya.

piva00

an hour ago

What is comparable to Hetzner in price/scale/features?

khurs

21 minutes ago

OVH is one

Imustaskforhelp

34 minutes ago

If you want very small servers: either get a 7$/yr vps or (upcloud if all you want is 1gb ram/1core esq server for very lightweight purposes)

The thing after Hetzner's price increase is that there isn't one size fits all anymore and I guess it might not impact people like me who knows in my opinion, many providers but in this situation its a net loss for many who might be paying higher prices. So here is my small list:

if you want vps that are behind nat: @backtogeek at (tierhive.net) is your guy. He's on hackernews as well.

If you want a very small vps with high egress: Upcloud is an interesting option as they provide 33TB (100mbps) even on their smallest machines. Ionos is a good option as well.

Dedirock/host-c are good for storage backup. Don't rely on their reliability or bandwidth but rely on having multiple deplyoments on different such servers for good backups.

Main: OVHCloud/Greencloud/onidel/buyvm and to a lesser degree Netcup as well are some good verdicts. I like layer7 and servarica as well and I have personally talked in direct messages to the person behind loclix.io

I personally use TNAHosting/Avahosting 7$/11$ yr servers respectively as I am idling them. You might be amazed by what 7$ servers can achieve as I usually code in golang/rust which work extremely good, I also host my own mail server on Tnahosting as it has port 25 enabled (though I do this just for fun) and in my lifetime, I also had a Netcup vps for 10$ for 3 months which had 8gb ram and 4 cores and 500 gb HDD.

I use cloudflare tunnels in front of my vps to prevent DDOS, not that my website has a lot of traffic anyway and have previously made custom scripts to manage it easier and I sometimes use zed and zed's remote server to connect to my server especially when I was on my netcup server and I also use micro-editor quite frequently on my vps's.

Oh can't forget xhosts.uk if you want UK vps's. I really feel like they are a good host and I have said their story on HN earlier as well but they sadly had some disabilities but instead of taking the disability check, they wanted to earn and make their own way and so have operated a vps servers because they like doing this. I really have a lot of respect for them.

"instead of taking the easy option and claim all kinds of money from the government for my disabilities I work as much as I can and hope I strike it lucky with the right customers one day."

This is a comment that they had written with me in personal discussions.

Ethernet servers is a good provider if you want port 25 access/mail access from what I've heard about them as they don't usually allow it. Skrime.eu can fit in some of my criterias as well. H4F.net(Riyad) is a respected provider as well.

Advinserver is good as well as they provide the stats of all servers so you can find the amount of steal and other factors and I have heard some people say some good things about them.

Hosting is one of the few businesses which is cooperative and competitive between many of these players and especially on the lower side of things run much on goodwill. There are always some cases of complaints but its a comfy space. You can almost find a specific host which can be best for your use case and it can be worth finding them out. I have tried to give the limited knowledge that I have.

but lets face it, what i have written is probably a brain fart and Its mostly information overload and I dont expect people to change their providers with this but my point is to be more aware about the provider space in general and to find the best provider for your own specific use case.

Feel free to e-mail me (mail in profile) if you have any specific use case and if I could help optimize the bill or give a more specific list of providers who can help in your use case. Price itself isn't the only factor as there are of reputation, steal factor, long term sustainability and many others.

I have spent too much time on such forums (to even a detrimental cost indeed) and I just like sharing the few things that I know. Perhaps I can get someone to save some money as some of these providers have affiliate programs and I can then spend that money to buy more french fries :-D

Have a nice day and take care. Domains are much more simplified though than servers and I recommend people to look at https://tld-list.com if they want to find out about domains.

farfatched

an hour ago

To be fair, a large fraction of Hetzner's costs will be RAM/SSD prices (since that is what they are selling), and they're in a competitive market, and known to have competitive pricing.

Bunny CDN of course runs on RAM/SSD but their costs are also developing and operating services on top. Their costs are comparatively less impacted by the RAM/SSD issue.

Hetzner might not have raised prices so suddenly if they had similar services.

Indeed, Hetzner DNS has been free for a long time.

khurs

2 hours ago

Just looked at their website, they don't do many loss leaders as others, for example others offer free static site hosting.

But they are a private company with only one small $6m funding round back in 2022, so I think they are more focused on building organically and not chasing investor funded growth.

Good luck to Bunny!

dizhn

2 hours ago

It sounds like they made it free for customers for up to 500 domains. It also sounds like they were charging for DNS resolution before? Or is it DNS hosting?

>So, we’ve eliminated DNS query fees entirely.

> Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries and includes free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains per account. There are no query limits, no per-request billing, and no critical features hidden behind enterprise plans. (Yes, that includes smart records and health monitoring too.)

>As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.

Oh..kayy.

Havoc

22 minutes ago

The one dollar thing isn’t as bad in practice as it sounds since it covers everything. Basically invoice minimum across everything so if you’re using the platform in any meaningful way it’s a non issue

bcye

2 hours ago

They were charging for nameserver hosting. The main draw are some advanced programmatic features for (geo) routing, scripting, etc.

summarity

an hour ago

Their DNS is also scriptable, it’s not just a name server

KingOfCoders

2 hours ago

You had some - millions (?) of - DNS queries free in the past.

Scaled

an hour ago

I'm glad to hear the queries are free now! I somehow managed to blow through the free quota, not by like a crazy amount but enough that I started thinking in most circumstances why pay extra for basic dns when registrar's is free? Even barely used domains were getting tons of queries. And I only need the fancy failover feature on a couple domains, though it is nice for those for sure. Anyway with this I don't have to worry about it anymore, so thanks Bunny!

dizhn

an hour ago

First time I am hearing of paying for DNS resolution but I am just a civilian.

anonzzzies

39 minutes ago

Aws charges for everything including that.

iso1631

41 minutes ago

route53 charge somewhere in the region of $0.40 per million queries

khurs

2 hours ago

Yes. Many others are free with no $1 minimum (e.g. Cloudflare)

chaz6

36 minutes ago

I wanted to give Cloudflare a go, but I did not want to move my whole domain. Unfortunately you can only host a subdomain with a paid account.

thepasch

2 hours ago

something something are the product

khurs

2 hours ago

Cloudflare's business model appears to be wait till someone is generating lots of bandwidth and then give them 30 days to move up a tier or be closed down.

I've read reports of companies on the business plan being strong armed into signing Enterprise plans with 1 year upfront.

It's a listed company with revenue expectations, and VERY good at marketing itself, but it's free tier of CDN/DDOS to start off with is a good deal.

trick-or-treat

an hour ago

Move up a tier or move somewhere where it costs even more. That seems kinda reasonable, really.

9294

8 minutes ago

Kudos to Bunny.net!

I'm really waiting for a streamlined static website hosting experience to move everything to Bunny. At the moment, Cloudflare Pages is still much more straightforward with one CLI command to deploy a website.

Also, we are using Bunny containers with our global API gateway with 16 worldwide locations and it is really crazy - the cost is $3.60/mo (Go backend + Bunny billing based on resource utilization, not provisioning). With a relatively small usage of 20k API requests/mo, it's still stupidly cheap.

jeremyjh

an hour ago

Their website loads really fast. Its sad that this is remarkable, but it really is.

guerrilla

an hour ago

Damn, you're right. Ugh, everything else is truly molasses.

kenanfyi

an hour ago

It's nothing new to make a DNS service free, but still kudos to Bunny. I moved to Bunny CDN couple of months ago from CF and it's been great so far. They don't have all that fancy things that CF has, but I guess it's also not their target. It's a great and extremely fast CDN that makes it easy to host many kind of websites. They also have things like Edge Rules, WAF, Cache Control etc.

I deploy my website using their API. So on every push, GitHub Actions builds it and copies the dist/ to Bunny and purges the cache afterwards. Everything has been working perfectly. I can only recommend. It's also quite easy if you don't know about the modern way of doing things and just want to use an FTP to put your website online. Especially attractive for IndieWeb folks.

tao_oat

2 hours ago

I'm using Bunny DNS and it's been mostly unremarkable (which is a very good thing for a DNS provider)!

The only annoyance is that their domain import auto-detects existing records, but it seems to miss a lot of them so you end up manually copying a lot of things over anyway.

farfatched

2 hours ago

In their defence, nobody can implement auto-detecting domains well, because there's no way to efficiently enumerate DNS records.

(Excluding NSEC-style enumeration, which is not always available.)

sc6782682

an hour ago

I'm a BunnyDNS user and wanted to share a warning - the import from a zone file can drop records silently, and the export will fail to export some of your records. I reported bugs some months ago, they replied they've fixed some but it's still a problem.

Spirit: ensure you keep a good copy of your zone files (bind format), their import / export has issues (it also doesn't include SOA or NS records). I spent time (before the recent fixes) manually validating records.

rahimnathwani

2 hours ago

That's not their fault, though. There's no perfectly reliable way to enumerate the DNS records for a particular domain.

KingOfCoders

2 hours ago

I love bunny so much - I host 10+ (Hugo) websites there and I pay basically nothing (+ CDN, DNS, ...).

postepowanieadm

2 hours ago

Have you managed to turn everything off? I had been playing with magic containers, turned everything off and then discovered every month I was charged 1usd + vat for nothing. A bit annoying.

Trollmann

2 hours ago

IIUC this is by design. If you have an account with them you will pay at least $1/month. The only way to get rid of this is to delete the account.

LoganDark

2 hours ago

From TFA:

> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend

khurs

2 hours ago

how do you pay nothing? As CDN isn't free?

kenanfyi

an hour ago

Correct. In Bunny you have a $1/month minimum cost. I guess that's so low for them, that it's kinda nothing.

AussieWog93

12 minutes ago

Just responding to Lapsa here - yes, you're shadowbanned. I looked into your post history and it looks like you were banned after making posts on unrelated threads about microwave transmissions causing auitory hallucinations. Dang directly said to you that he'd banned your account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173429#48176202

All posts since then have come up dead, except for one about Factorio for some reason.

On a side note, Lapsa, you can test your theory about microwave transmissions fairly easily by simply going inside of a faraday cage. Simplest method I can think of is to go to the hardware/furniture store and stand in a metal storage cabinet. If you can still hear the voices, then it means they're not being transmitted from external microwaves - a microwave capable of causing the Frey Effect can't penetrate thicker metal like that unless there are gaps of ~1cm or more.

If others could please downvote this comment so that it goes to the bottom and he can see it, that would be greatly appreciated!

JdeBP

2 hours ago

For the people asking what kind of DNS service this is, content or proxy: You have to look 'Bunny DNS' up in the products menu and from there follow the hyperlink to the doco.

* https://docs.bunny.net/dns

So it's content DNS service; with server-side resource record shuffling; and with JavaScript, and badly written examples that don't check the question type, just to make it weird.

anonzzzies

38 minutes ago

I do not mind paying for everything as long as there is good ddos protection as getting charged for stuff I cannot help is an immediate cancel and also I won’t pay, come get me.

bcye

2 hours ago

Very nice and a great service. I wish there API Keys were scoped however so setting up continuous deployments doesn't risk your, say, MX records getting changed if the key is leaked. And it would be very awesome if they would support IPv6-only origins for the CDN.

joe-at-bunny

14 minutes ago

Hey! Thanks for the feedback.

We're doing discovery on API key scopes at the moment, we don't yet have a public ETA for this but rest assured it's being worked on!

Regarding IPv6-only origin support, We brought this in just last week! We now support IPv6-only addresses direct as an origin, as a hostname, as well as dual stack hostname resolution.

Best, Joe

injidup

21 minutes ago

What the fuck is their cookie banner. Worst dark pattern I've ever seen. The options are

"Appreciate it" or "Cool carry on"

I don't feel inclined to click either and exited immediately.

bux93

4 minutes ago

Agreed. Their privacy page even says they'll remove data if you withdraw consent, but they don't ask for consent. They also don't mention any you could object to data processing, claiming that "Processing is necessary to perform a contract with the data subject and to take steps toward the conclusion of a business relationship." which is a very contorted interpretation; taking steps towards the conclusion is about making quotes and such. It makes me sour on their claims "Keep your data private, compliant, and fully in the EU. As a privacy-first European company, we help you stay aligned with GDPR. No surprises. Full transparency."

nottorp

8 minutes ago

Too bad, because it basically said they only use necessary cookies.

I suppose you'd have complained if there were no cookie banner as well?

sreekanth850

26 minutes ago

Biggest feature is dns loadbalancing.

mistic92

an hour ago

Interesting, but I have too much stuff configured in Cloudflare :<

tonyhart7

24 minutes ago

more competition is a good thing, always welcome for alternative

ramon156

an hour ago

I'm pretty bummed I never got hired at BunnyNet. Seems like such a cool company to work for, and I ticked their boxes in the application

jaffa2

2 hours ago

So is this just a dns service? I can use their servers to service dns requests? The main webpage unfortunately has a lot of marketing speak that says a lot but doesnt really tell me what it is.

Quote “ At bunny.net, our mission has always been ambitious but focused: help make the internet hop faster.

To do that, we’ve built a massive global network spanning 119 locations and counting. Today, this network powers over 1.5 million websites and consistently delivers some of the fastest content delivery around the globe. But while deploying thousands of servers globally is an impressive feat on its own, the hardware itself does not explain how bunny.net is able to deliver such an impressive level of performance.

The real secret hides under the hood, embedded in the routing engine that directs every request, every user, and sends traffic exactly where it needs to go. That engine is Bunny DNS”

Ok… so what is it? Router? Dns? Software? Service? Upon reading again that para actually sounds a bit like AI slop, could explain it.

farfatched

2 hours ago

Its an authoritative DNS service, so it can host your domains.

Compare with a recursive resolver, like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1, which you can use to resolve domains.

What's nice about Bunny DNS is that they have authoritative nameservers ~everywhere, so resolving is quick everywhere.

But I think in practice this isn't that useful, since if a domain is moderately used, its DNS records will be cached ~everywhere in anycasted recursive resolvers.

__jonas

an hour ago

You were looking at the website of Bunny, which is a company that offers primarily a CDN service, as well as other related things like compute hosting, object storage, DNS etc.

It's comparable to Cloudflare, if you're familiar with that, though Bunny is based in the EU instead of US.

This post is about their scriptable DNS service, which used to be paid and is now free.

decide1000

23 minutes ago

Finally! Now it becomes economic for us to make the move! Goodbye CloudFlare!

hoechst

an hour ago

a free dns service? wow that's insane.