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Discussion Sentiment

78% Positive

Analyzed from 2231 words in the discussion.

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#dns#bunny#hetzner#free#service#don#still#everything#records#cloudflare

Discussion (73 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Lucasoatoabout 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.

1dom4 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!

scandoxabout 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.
jeremyjhabout 1 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.

Imustaskforhelpabout 1 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 :-(

heybales44 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.
faverin4 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.

chpatrickabout 1 hour ago
Hetzner can't magically buy cheap hardware and prices have multiplied the last year.
piva00about 1 hour ago
What is comparable to Hetzner in price/scale/features?
farfatchedabout 2 hours 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.

khursabout 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!

dizhnabout 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.

Havoc24 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
bcyeabout 2 hours ago
They were charging for nameserver hosting. The main draw are some advanced programmatic features for (geo) routing, scripting, etc.
summarityabout 2 hours ago
Their DNS is also scriptable, it’s not just a name server
KingOfCodersabout 2 hours ago
You had some - millions (?) of - DNS queries free in the past.
Scaledabout 1 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!
dizhnabout 1 hour ago
First time I am hearing of paying for DNS resolution but I am just a civilian.
anonzzzies41 minutes ago
Aws charges for everything including that.
iso163143 minutes ago
route53 charge somewhere in the region of $0.40 per million queries
khursabout 2 hours ago
Yes. Many others are free with no $1 minimum (e.g. Cloudflare)
chaz638 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.
thepaschabout 2 hours ago
something something are the product
92949 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.

jeremyjhabout 1 hour ago
Their website loads really fast. Its sad that this is remarkable, but it really is.
guerrillaabout 1 hour ago
Damn, you're right. Ugh, everything else is truly molasses.
kenanfyiabout 1 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.

chaz6about 1 hour ago
This is good news! For anybody wondering, there is a terraform provider available.

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/BunnyWay/bunnynet/la...

tao_oatabout 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.

farfatchedabout 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.)

sc6782682about 1 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.

rahimnathwaniabout 2 hours ago
That's not their fault, though. There's no perfectly reliable way to enumerate the DNS records for a particular domain.
KingOfCodersabout 2 hours ago
I love bunny so much - I host 10+ (Hugo) websites there and I pay basically nothing (+ CDN, DNS, ...).
postepowanieadmabout 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.
phlsaabout 2 hours ago
There seems to be a $1 minimum charge on all accounts, regardless of whether or not you use them[1]

[1] https://bunny.net/pricing/#:~:text=%241%20monthly%20minimum

thisislife2about 1 hour ago
So "free DNS hosting" is misleading marketing? (I signed up but wasn't asked for credit card info).
KingOfCodersabout 2 hours ago
Yes, that is what I pay ("basically nothing")
Trollmannabout 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.
LoganDarkabout 2 hours ago
From TFA:

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

khursabout 2 hours ago
how do you pay nothing? As CDN isn't free?
kenanfyiabout 1 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.
AussieWog9314 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!

JdeBPabout 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.

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anonzzzies39 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.
bcyeabout 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-bunny15 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

injidup23 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.

bux936 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."
nottorp9 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?

sreekanth85028 minutes ago
Biggest feature is dns loadbalancing.
wouldbecouldbeabout 1 hour ago
Bunny.net is awesome!
mistic92about 1 hour ago
Interesting, but I have too much stuff configured in Cloudflare :<
unsungNoveltyabout 1 hour ago
All the more reason to use this? :)
tonyhart725 minutes ago
more competition is a good thing, always welcome for alternative
ramon156about 1 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
jaffa2about 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.

farfatchedabout 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.

__jonasabout 1 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.

decide100025 minutes ago
Finally! Now it becomes economic for us to make the move! Goodbye CloudFlare!
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hoechstabout 1 hour ago
a free dns service? wow that's insane.