We’re making Bunny DNS free

755

ddabinat about 12 hours ago 242 commentsRead Article on bunny.net

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

80% Positive

Analyzed from 6291 words in the discussion.

Discussion (242 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Lucasoato•about 11 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.

scandox•about 11 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•about 11 hours 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.

This gives the breakdown:

https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...

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.

There is also large premium for hosting in Ashburn compared to Europe for the CPX line, which are the shared/subscribed tier. The SKUs are different so its not directly comparable but for example CPX32 (4vCPU/8GB) is 35.49 EUR in Falkenstein but a CPX31 (4vCPU/8GB) is 62.49 EUR in Ashburn and has far less bandwidth.

ymolodtsov•about 7 hours ago

Not sure. They were cheaper than DigitalOcean, to the point where 1 DO instance cost would give you 3 on Hetzner, but now they're at parity, and DO seems to have a better product.

metadat•about 7 hours ago

That is shockingly more expensive. Damn, rip hetzner.

Imustaskforhelp•about 11 hours 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•about 10 hours 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.

chpatrick•about 10 hours ago

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

piva00•about 10 hours ago

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

faverin•about 9 hours 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.

mhitza•about 8 hours ago

They are competitive price wise, but less competent human wise.

Their lack of user care shows when you start talking to support. I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".

The most recent that really put the cherry on top.

I was planning on dropping them when running out of prepaid credits.

ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.

What is a point of a credit bar (progress bar) of you can go into negative? I went into negative.

There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.

Which should remain as credits in your account for future use.

But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.

Support: paraphrasing "that sounds right". And I could be quoting them with this for almost all 3 times I've interacted with them.

Yes, I am very much unpleased on customer support experience. But they are not unique and a symptom of multiple EU providers I've switched to in the last 3 years.

psini•about 8 hours ago

Not saying there are companies going above and beyond for customer service but getting a human answer at all when spending single-digit euros a month seems impressive enough; then again I am european so certainly biased :)

What would an american provider have done? Changed their pricing model for you?

nijave•about 7 hours ago

It is common for support to closely work with product and be able to respond with product roadmap and feature guidance.

At least they can say "we sympathize but it's not a priority" or "it's a medium priority but we don't have a concrete timeline" or at least recommend best practices/workarounds

mhitza•about 8 hours ago

My website traffic was a couple megabytes per month. I paid them for about 3 years for neglegible usage. Should I have zero expectation for paying because its cheap?

You can be metered or fixed price. Mixing the two in the most inuintive way possible is a true innovation. /s

Other cloud based provider have the option to pay for your usage to the cent. I guess that innovation didn't reach the EU. /s

kerridge0•about 7 hours ago

Something similar happened to me with twilio - years ago I had a number 'parked' with them, my card expired, they never notified me, account went into arrears, and they cancelled my number. I was quite a special number, a UK '0200' number they'd released somehow, which shouldn't have been released. When they then acquired sendgrid, to add insult to injury I eventually found out that I was blacklisted and had to go through various validation procedures in order to do business with them, which I declined to do.

littlecranky67•about 6 hours ago

How much do you pay per month? Never expect a real human tech expert if you only pay 10$/month for something. A human talking to you for 15minutes destroys their entire profit margin on your payments for years. Unless you hit a bug or something in their system, support is expensive.

KomoD•about 6 hours ago

> ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.

"Our system will automatically send multiple warning emails if your account balance drops beyond a certain point" from https://bunny.net/faq

I don't know what that "certain point" is, though.

> There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.

Yeah, annoying but also understandable because of payment processing fees.

> But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.

That's incorrect, if you have zones, then you get billed €1/mo, if you don't have anything, then you aren't billed anything... this is my billing history:

Monthly usage for May, 2026: $1

Monthly usage for February, 2026: $1

Monthly usage for July, 2024: $1

Monthly usage for June, 2024: $1

Monthly usage for July, 2022: $1

mhitza•about 6 hours ago

First one didn't happen, so I don't know what the threshold is. But don't sell me a credit based system if it can go in the negative. Again for a progress bar that doesn't represent negatives.

You are correct on the billing front. I checked the dashboard and I misremembered the day I switched off my resources. June was a slow moving month and I though it happened last month!

I'll retract my claim in the previous comment if I still can edit.

looperhacks•about 6 hours ago

So you unhappy with their pricing policy, which sounds understandable. But what were you expecting the support to do about this?

mhitza•about 5 hours ago

Maybe an acknowledgement that is a limitation that they understand and it would be something they could change in the future. Maybe showing understanding that it is surprising that a credit based system goes into negative.

I don't know, this was not the first time I got surprised by their system.

Before that I preloaded my account for a couple of credits (+vat). Then they switched to monthly invoicing (+vat for my existing credit). Basically I got double VATed (?) for the single initial payment. Paid for 12 months upfront only to have to recharge more quickly. Why should it be my problem that they have problems understanding billing and building billing systems?

In the past when I signed up it was advertised as usage based billing with the fixed monthly fee somewhere in the fine print? But there is also some usage minimum because at some point I started getting credits used. But not in the first few months where my traffic was under some threshold.

It doesn't help that they constantly move things around in their website with no clear thought. Like how I was corrected in another comment thread with information that isn't on the expected pages like pricing or terms of service.

Maybe they just lack understanding of user experience. Or I'm just a dumb user. I accept either theory.

edit: honestly I don't know if I was double VAT situation or just became a non VAT except company, and ain't gonna dig that up, but if it's the later they should have swallowed the cost for existing credit because changing expected outcomes mid way is no bueno.

re-thc•about 8 hours ago

> I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".

Similar US vendors = you're lucky to even get someone to talk to or is too far from the chain to actually know so you get a "generic" answer.

BenjiWiebe•about 3 hours ago

(Before Linode was acquired) I called in and quickly got on the phone with a live human who was very familiar with the product and helpful, and sounded (accent) like US-based support.

At the time I was paying $12/month IIRC.

1dom•about 9 hours 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!

letmevoteplease•about 9 hours ago

I think you're confusing this with the more classic "it's not X, but Y" trope. That sentence is a comma splice that I'd expect LLMs to avoid by default.

laszlojamf•about 9 hours ago

this might be a case of AI feedback, where people have been exposed to so much AI writing that they are starting to write like AI themselves.

1dom•about 9 hours ago

I agree! It might even be an issue on my side, where I'm exposed to AI generated stuff that often that everything starts looking like a trope when it's not.

Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.

close04•about 9 hours ago

As a general observation, because I can't vouch for who used AI or not, claiming LLM is also a quick way to dismiss things. LLMs learned from human output so it should be obvious to anyone that enough humans write or express ideas in that style that it became the default for LLMs. Ideas were rarely judged on their merit on the internet even before LLMs, this AI age just gave those looking for a shallow dismissal more options.

Lucasoato•about 7 hours ago

Here's an answer you can write in Hackernews:

   I'm really sorry if it sounded like a GPT trope, but that came 100% from me.
   Not that this is a guarantee of quality (actually it's not), but certainly
   authenticity. Probably I'm using so many agents lately that I'm starting
   speaking like them lol

If you want I can make it sound more natural, just let me know and I'll change it!

hk__2•about 9 hours ago

> That sounds like a GPT trope

It sounds natural to me. Remember that most people here are non-native speakers, including OP.

fragmede•about 9 hours ago

This is how the bourgeoisie win. By getting the intellectuals to fight amongst themselves, not about the ideas in the text that might threaten them, but by an offkilter assessment of the idea's provenance. Come on. Maybe We could argue about immigrants instead?

goobatrooba•about 9 hours ago

To be fair, Hetzner didn't change prices for existing services, just for new customers / services added. I think that's a fair and realistic approach.

I guess what this reveals is that they were operating on really tight margins.

MiddleEndian•about 9 hours ago

As someone who recently switched from Rackspace to Hetzner for my dedicated VPS (albeit before the recent price jump), I am still quite happy with my decision. Apparently they are not raising their prices for existing customers, but even so, their prices are consistent and very clearly laid out, they don't change month-to-month, and their website is incredibly easy to use (both when choosing options, and when doing server management), which is more than I can say for Rackspace lol (or Linode now that they're owned by Akamai)

farfatched•about 11 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.

sparkling•about 6 hours ago

The Hetzner price increase was brutal, but the reality is: Hetzner VPS prices are still a fraction of comparable AWS EC2 instances.

>many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart.

I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterprise accounts, they want mature, manage services.

The few EU clouds that do have a comparable range of managed services also have AWS-like pricing: https://eualternative.eu/eu-cloud-comparison/

nalekberov•about 7 hours ago

> not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company,

Great for what? Centralizing the internet? making it impossible to exercise your rights to delete your account? Not making alternative plans when one line of change breaks many services?

sscaryterry•about 8 hours ago

+1 (828) 660-1813 seems American, no?

KomoD•about 8 hours ago

The sales number is American, but the company is Slovenian.

khurs•about 11 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!

wahnfrieden•about 2 hours ago

They also have prepaid plans so that you have no risk of runaway metered costs

sparkling•about 6 hours ago

They have a $1 minimum spend across all services. You can effectively host unlimited static sites for $1.

ahmednazir•about 4 hours ago

You can host static sites with no cost in multiple provider like cloudflare Page, Github Page etc.

arcanemachiner•about 3 hours ago

I would spend a dollar I'd it meant avoiding both of those companies.

frail_figure•about 3 hours ago

Bunny is EU-based afaik, the ones you mention are not.

dizhn•about 11 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.

toast0•about 1 hour ago

> It also sounds like they were charging for DNS resolution before? Or is it DNS hosting?

High end DNS hosting is often billed around the number of queries, number of zones, and number of records, number of special names with fancy features, etc. If you're switching from other DNS hosting, you might not even know what the query volume is, so that's kind of exciting when you need to make a switch.

If you were paying per query and the cost was too high, raising TTLs and consolidating services onto fewer hostnames are pretty achievable ways to reduce the query volume, so it is something you have some control over.

bcye•about 11 hours ago

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

Havoc•about 10 hours 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

1dom•about 9 hours ago

The 1 dollar thing, I think, looks exceptionally bad because it shows that what Bunny says can't be taken at face value.

The fact is we're here because they posted a blog talking about how great they are making DNS free "because a faster internet won’t build itself".

But now I've just learnt from comments on HN that Bunny DNS isn't free.

They've lost my trust before they even had it.

dizhn•about 9 hours ago

Besides $1 means you need to give them your credit card from day one. That's probably the only reason they have that minimum limit to begin with.

dust-jacket•about 7 hours ago

No, this is just a silly take.

AWS can make data export free, and no-one's going to shout at them that it's not free because it cost money to store the data there in the first place.

Bunny offers a number of services to paying customers. One of the services, that would previously have incurred a cost, now does not. It is free.

Havoc•about 8 hours ago

Huh?

It literally explains this in the blog post

> 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.

Sure seems like you’re trying very hard to find a problem here.

If you’re not down with their prepaid/$1 model there is always CF.

KingOfCoders•about 11 hours ago

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

Scaled•about 10 hours 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•about 10 hours ago

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

anonzzzies•about 10 hours ago

Aws charges for everything including that.

iso1631•about 10 hours ago

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

khurs•about 11 hours ago

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

chaz6•about 10 hours 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•about 11 hours ago

something something are the product

summarity•about 11 hours ago

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

hnarn•about 6 hours ago

The first few hundred words on that page does not explain why I should care about this, and amazingly neither does the comments here on HN.

yoyohello13•about 6 hours ago

Top Comment

> EU based alternative to Cloudflare

nateb2022•about 5 hours ago

Curious if bunny.net offers any measurable DNS performance improvements over Cloudflare or vice versa.

Diti•about 8 hours ago

I want to love Bunny. But I am terrified about being suddenly charged thousands of euros if some unexpected traffic from LLM/crawler activity happens.

As far as I know, Bunny products are their own business units with their own goals and feature requests (Bunny Stream, in particular, lacks a lot of features) and the “block all requests after the bill becomes 50 EUR” ONLY exists for Bunny CDN, not for their other products.

The day Bunny starts treating all their products evenly (and listen to requests asking to implement basic features) will be the day I will switch all my nonprofit communities to their services.

kassner•about 7 hours ago

You wouldn’t be charged thousands because the service is pre-paid. Your websites will be suspended once the balance runs out, but you can re-establish them once you add more balance.

AFAIK is the only provider in which you can have functional billing limits and not just alerts that still depend on you reacting on them in time.

mhitza•about 7 hours ago

It's not purely prepaid otherwise I wouldn't be charged into negative (see my other comment in this thread).

kassner•about 7 hours ago

It’s not like they’re going to put a debt collector after the $0.73 that you’d owe, so I’m not sure what was your point. If you want the services to continue you gotta have some balance. If they allow your account to run below balance I’d say that’s on them.

Diti•about 5 hours ago

Where in the terms of service or in the admin UI do you see this information? You can pre-pay, yes, and the CDN service (and ONLY the CDN service) has a setting to stop the billing. But the other services do not seem to have a limit on how much you can get billed.

kassner•about 5 hours ago

I don't have a credit card on file, I'm not sure how they are going get paid if my balance goes negative.

Also: https://support.bunny.net/hc/en-us/articles/360000235911-How...

But yes, other services will run until your account is dry, then it gets suspended. You can't set a spend limit on your scripts without it taking down the whole account. You can't do cost optimization, but at least you are protected from going bankrupt.

mmarian•about 7 hours ago

Problem is, Cloudflare's free tier plan effectively sets the limit to $0.

jedisct1•about 7 hours ago

Exactly!

I once had some pretty serious DoS attack, but fortunately, I didn't had to pay more than what was pre-paid.

dabinat•about 2 hours ago

I’m not sure which Bunny service you’re referring to specifically but Bunny Shield can mitigate DDOS attacks and block bots.

KomoD•about 8 hours ago

> I want to love Bunny. But I am terrified about being suddenly charged thousands of euros if some unexpected traffic from LLM/crawler activity happens.

If it's just some simple website, then LLM/crawlers probably won't get you anywhere near thousands of euros. The CDN costs $0.01 - $0.06 per GB

...

You can limit some of their services, like the CDN (which is the most important one in my opinion):

- Download speed limit

- Requests per IP

- Data transfer per IP

- Max connections per IP

And monthly bandwidth limit, which disables the zone if you reach x GB.

9294•about 9 hours 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.

bcye•about 7 hours ago

I hope this might be of use to you, it's exactly that, one-command deployments. :) It's still early, but I'm using it across my deployments and it works pretty flawlessly.

https://tangled.org/bruceroettgers.eu/bunnyup

9294•about 6 hours ago

nice, I will check it out!

JdeBP•about 11 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.

herodotus•about 7 hours ago

I am seeing way to many "Performing security verification This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot." from Cloudfare these days. It strikes me that, if it has verified my client once, it should hold off at least for a day or so before putting me through that hoop again. How does Bunny DNS deal with bot protection?

Chu4eeno•about 5 hours ago

Wasn't Privacy Pass supposed to fix this? Let the browser generate and store some PoW or something that it hands off to the site, so each site doesn't have to do the same thing.

https://github.com/cloudflare/pp-browser-extension seems kind of dead (a dependabot zombie).

eta: I completely missed this two days ago: https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudfl...

timpera•about 7 hours ago

I have the same experience, and I ended up removing Cloudflare from the websites I manage since there were too many complaints from users with shared connections or exotic browsers.

mmarian•about 7 hours ago

Not sure if you're talking about different sites or same one. If different sites, it doesn't make much sense to add that feature because site owners would rarely (if ever) want it. If same site, blame again the site owner who has the ability to configure challenge cookie expiry.

jeremyjh•about 10 hours ago

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

freakynit•about 8 hours ago

Damn!! I just tried a few links from navbar... all loaded in an instant like they have already been cached, even though they were not (since I use firefox in full private mode, and haven't visited their site in like months before today).

guerrilla•about 10 hours ago

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

bcye•about 11 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•about 9 hours 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

bcye•about 3 hours ago

That's awesome to hear, thanks!

It would be awesome if the API would get more robust and documented in general -- right now it seems some params seem to not really work (ex storage zone search), and other endpoints take so many without much clarity over what will be set as the default and what's required. I found that for most calls I needed to check the network requests from the dashboard to see how to use them, would be awesome to have more documentation and examples here showing common flows.

xyzzy_plugh•about 7 hours ago

Hey Joe, just to pile on...

If you had have supported API key scoping then I'd have a ton of businesses/startups running on you. As it stands currently it's difficult for me to recommend you to orgs that are scaling up. Compliance in particular was the biggest issue. For one-man shops it's a no-brainer.

In your defense, Cloudflare has historically also sucked in this area.

Anyways, I'm looking forward to this feature!

is_true•about 9 hours ago

Hello Joe.

How does the USD1 minimum works? Say I have setup a pull zone and i don't use it for over a month, I get charged anyway?

Thanks.

tpetry•about 7 hours ago

Yes. You‘re getting charged. But a dollar for your entire bunny account (not for every service or domain) is not that much to ask for.

tpetry•about 7 hours ago

I wish for the sme. Right now I‘ve created specialized edge functions to e.g. make a deployment which has the global access key.

So, my scripts on my servers dont have the bunny api key. Its only saved within those edge functions and I authenticate against the edge functions.

A little bit more effort than scoped keys but it works

kenanfyi•about 10 hours 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.

nubinetwork•about 8 hours ago

> Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries

I've owned domains for ~20 years... I'm okay for paying for the domain, I'm okay with some of that money being used to maintain the DNS servers... I've never had a company charge for queries. Why would they do that?

lokar•about 6 hours ago

Serving static records with reasonable TTLs (so you get caching) is pretty much always free.

Dynamic, geo routed, load balanced low TTL queries tend to have a fee.

mikkei•about 7 hours ago

Well, AWS is an example of provide who does charges for it, starting at $0.4/million queries...

spiderfarmer•about 8 hours ago

GeoDNS often isn't free.

tao_oat•about 11 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•about 11 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.)

Chu4eeno•about 5 hours ago

I feel like I'm missing something, AXFR?

meeb•about 1 hour ago

Almost no mainstream existing provider you’re migrating from would support AXFR from Bunny’s servers. But yes, AXFR would be the ideal solution in a perfect world.

rahimnathwani•about 11 hours ago

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

sc6782682•about 10 hours 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.

fredrickleo•about 8 hours ago

I read this headline as "DNS free" and was intrigued, like they would be distributing hosts files or something.

chaz6•about 10 hours ago

This is good news! For anybody wondering, there is a terraform provider available.

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

Sibexico•about 8 hours ago

Wait, someone paid them for DNS before? It was many FREE DNS services since early 00's, I even will not say nothing about the domain names registrants who almost always (with literally few exceptions) provides free DNS.

ralish•about 8 hours ago

Uh, paying for DNS isn't uncommon? Examples off the top of my head:

- Akamai DNS

- AWS Route 53

- Azure DNS

- Cloudflare (excluding personal/hobbyist plan)

- Google Cloud DNS

And many, many others. And I note the site you posted this comment on is using Route 53, so probably paid as I doubt their query volume would be in the free tier.

Paying for DNS for personal/hobby stuff is probably pretty uncommon, because like you say, most domain registrars will offer it for free. But commercial websites often will, particularly larger ones with serious traffic.

sebiw•about 8 hours ago

Domain Registrars usually have shitty, subpar DNS eg. without Anycast or DNSSEC.

savikko•about 8 hours ago

If i have understood correctly, Anycast is not feature of DNS but a feature of BGP.

Otherwise, that is my observation also.

celsoazevedo•about 4 hours ago

I believe they're referring to the DNS servers. The closer they are to the user, the faster a DNS resolution happens.

A good provider will have different locations across the world, and users connect to the nearest datacentre. The free DNS some domain registrars offer is, sometimes, hosted at one single location. If the server is in the US and the user is in Europe, you're adding 80-150ms to requests. If they use "anycast" servers, the user could connect to a server 1-20ms away.

matja•about 8 hours ago

Amazon Route 53 is $0.40 per million DNS queries - which would terrify me if I used it, considering a typical 10Gbit server connection hosted at a unscrupulous ASN with no egress IP filtering is capable of sending a million DNS requests per second from random spoofed IP addresses.

awill•about 7 hours ago

I just signed up. The website (despite saying it's free here) has numerous banners of trials and free credits. Not quite what I was expecting from 'free'

KomoD•about 7 hours ago

They offer more services than just DNS.. their DNS service is "free", their other services aren't.

MadsRC•about 5 hours ago

Amazing news!

The one thing I wish they’d support is multiple zones and an RBAC system to grant certain users access to specific zones. If they’d offer that they’d be a serious contender to replace Cloudflare and AWS/GCP DNS

KingOfCoders•about 11 hours ago

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

postepowanieadm•about 11 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.

phlsa•about 11 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

KingOfCoders•about 11 hours ago

Yes, that is what I pay ("basically nothing")

thisislife2•about 10 hours ago

So "free DNS hosting" is misleading marketing? (I signed up but wasn't asked for credit card info).

Trollmann•about 11 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.

kassner•about 9 hours ago

TBF you can keep the account dormant if you delete all the resources. I have like $3 in balance left for over a year now.

LoganDark•about 11 hours ago

From TFA:

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

khurs•about 11 hours ago

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

kenanfyi•about 10 hours ago

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

jcalabro•about 7 hours ago

We use bunny as our CDN provider at Bluesky, and I have had a very positive experience! Team is great, service is great, price is great.

moontear•about 6 hours ago

Their claim is that they are European, but I see a US support hotline in the footer and all prices are in Dollar. Seems to be targeting the US market (which is smart), but I don't know whether the European angle wins there.

Bender•about 9 hours ago

Free secondary or are people supposed to make them primary and manage their DNS through Bunny? If primary that is the same sales technique Cloudflare used. It works, once one's DNS is managed there enabling CDN features is just clicking buttons.

eikenberry•about 2 hours ago

I've dug into this a bit and I'd say the answer is no, they do not support being used as a secondary.

teekert•about 8 hours ago

This is nice, I have some nameservers pointing to Hetzner so I can use Caddy to do domain validation via API and get https (with dedicated domains) on private LANs. But the Hetzner API keys are horribly, uncomfortably over-scoped and I haven't found a way to reduce that.

At least when I do DNS at bunny, a leaked key can't rent VMs on my CC. And I prefer EU infra (cloudflare works great though for this usecase). Who knows that my bunny account can grow into ;)

moontear•about 3 hours ago

So what’s the functional difference to Cloudflare (free) DNS? Anything besides „this is European“ that makes me want to switch?

raggi•about 3 hours ago

I have been fed up with DNSimple for a long time. Can any folks share positive experiences with Bunny?

__MatrixMan__•about 6 hours ago

Faster name resolution is chasing a local maximum. The better path to improving the internet is to rely on DNS less and content addressing more, that way content stays accessible as long as somebody on your part of the network has it.

lokar•about 6 hours ago

Something still has to locate the resource you want, and that will involve something equivalent to DNS.

__MatrixMan__•about 5 hours ago

Sure but it's a different game if instead of finding the machine that has the data, it can find any machine that has the data. That machine might be elsewhere on your lan or elsewhere in your city.

lokar•about 4 hours ago

But that's not how DNS works. It does not find /the/ node that matches the host element of the resource. It finds a list of nodes (often a subset of eligible nodes).

ah1508•about 6 hours ago

I just discovered bunny.net thanks to this post. I'd be happy to move my static websites on bunny.net, but is it possible (like on cloudflare) to map requests to /foo to the foo.html file ? According to what I read on the documentation it is not a edge rule.

dieselgate•about 6 hours ago

Pardon my ignorance but am curious what is an "edge rule"? Is it a tech-related term (i.e. edge case) or a figure of speech?

Chu4eeno•about 5 hours ago

"Edge" was the new "client", now it's everything outside your own servers, or at the border between your server and everyone else.

looperhacks•about 6 hours ago