I've used FreeDNS on occasion for test domain names, one-off experiments, and similar. I'm very appreciative this exists, but there are some pain points that similar services handle better.
The domains are missing from the public suffix list. This impacts how cookies are handled by the domain names, with concerns the browser will allow software to set the cookie on the shared domain name instead of the subdomain. This can be a security problem. Getting added to the PSL may not happen: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/pull/79
It can be difficult to get a free HTTPS certificate for your subdomain. Let's Encrypt applies per-domain name rate limits and these domain names see lots of issuance requests. There's a process to lift those limits, but last I checked FreeDNS didn't use it. You can still, of course, pay for a certificate.
There's tons of abuse on free domains so you may find that your domain is blocked on various lists.
Here are some compelling alternatives I use now, which manage these issues better:
See, before the cloud, you used to deploy your code to actual physical servers. If your site became really popular you needed more than one server to run it.
Before commercial and open source load balancers became a thing we literally used HTTP redirects to distribute load. You might visit www.example.com and get redirected to www13.example.com, which was an actual box in a datacenter.
I don't think the internet would exist today if websites just randomly fell over once the number of simultaneous users exceeded the capacity of a single server.
When I was at yahoo, we certainly had load balancers, but we didn't have super fancy load balancers that could separate traffic out by path, so each 'property' would use a different hostname (i worked on travel.yahoo.com, which is dead these many years), but we all shared a login cookie (and some other cookies).
We'd have certainly adapted if we couldn't share cookies, but it would have been a lot messier.
One of the complications that gets discussed is that there are way too many use cases with different requirements on what it means for domains to be related. The cookie problem is something browsers need to solve, so its perhaps reasonable that Mozilla (and volunteers) manage a list that focuses on that user case. But that's poorly suited for other use cases.
There's a lot of people thinking about this though. One somewhat related example is https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-manelidis-dnsop-domai..., which has a double-opt-in DNS TXT record mechanism. That draft and forthcoming discussions on the mailing list are a good place to understand the complexities here.
If, for example, you could trick a client into thinking "com" was not a public suffix, then from malicious.com you could set cookies on paypal.com
DNSSEC is not widely deployed, and so we cannot rely on the authenticity of DNS.
Maybe if we had DNSSEC, then we could rely on it for publicsuffix. Maybe lots of others things could be more easily solved if we had that too.
DNSSEC automation is coming, e.g. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc10026/. It might never become mainstream, but don't let anyone tell you that we couldn't benefit from having DNS authenticity!
Because it can't be. DNS tells you who's authoritative for a name, not who's allowed to be a security boundary — and those are different questions. Whether foo.co.uk is a registrable domain or a subdomain somebody sold you is a registry business decision, and ccTLDs disagree wildly about it. Some sell second-level, some don't, some changed their mind in 2014 and grandfathered everybody. There's no field in DNS that says "the boundary is here, trust me." So the browsers gave up and maintain a text file instead, which is ugly and correct.
The part that bites harder than cookies: PSL is the closest thing the web has to an entity table. If you live on a shared suffix — anything under mooo.com, dyndns.org, the ten thousand other free subdomain hosts — every crawler and every answer engine collapses you into the parent. Your page inherits the reputation of however many hundred thousand strangers happened to register next door. That's why free-subdomain sites are functionally invisible to search and to AI answers regardless of how good the content is. It's not a quality problem, it's a missing identity boundary, and there's no content fix for it.
The whole thread is basically that tradeoff in different clothes. Free DNS, free TLS, free hosting, free subdomain — every one of those gives you something real and quietly puts you in a bucket where nobody can tell you apart from the worst neighbor in it.
> Let's Encrypt applies per-domain name rate limits and these domain names see lots of issuance requests. There's a process to lift those limits.
I'm familiar with the process to lift those limits, and Let's Encrypt has been amenable to bumping the certs as high as 250,000 but balked at 500,000, saying, "This is too large for us to support"
(I run a DNS service nip.io / sslip.io, and lots of my users request certs, so I'm always bumping into the limits)
One thing has changed. At some point, they introduced the 'shared management queue', and any random person can attach a subdomain to my domains, and apparently I have to explicitly deny these. Until then, scammers can create a subdomain on my domain, point it to whatever IP they want, and use it for their nefarious purposes.
I get that I'm a freeloader: I haven't paid for FreeDNS, so I can't complain much. But this seems like a terrible 'feature'. If I were a pro subscriber, my domains would be private and therefore not available for scammers to use. I've migrated all but one of my domains away from the service (they were all trivially easy - just haven't finished the last one).
20+-year long user here, not an issue once. Josh replied to emails then and replies today still. Let's just hope there's someone to continue should something happen to him (chosen diety forbid).
You're conflating two different concepts: DNS hosting, and DNS resolving.
This service seems to offer hosting services, i.e. publishing your domain's records in the DNS in DNS authoritative servers.
A DNS resolution service looks up and maintains large caches of DNS data on your behalf, optimizing DNS lookups by not requiring your own device to recursively query many different DNS servers. These lookups start by querying the DNS root zone, which is published by the DNS's authoritative servers which are listed in the root hints file.
This looks so much like https://dns.he.net/ that it seems to me it can’t be a coincidence. Is this a case of copying a well known design or is there more to it?
omg, invoking php-nuke brings me back. fun era (recent php2shell wild ride notwithstanding). Honestly it's more like web 1.5 - not straight up hand written html but no wild client side stuff either.
And yes, there absolutely was a "look" that's a product of the technology of the time - tables for design, limited styling / js support, php "components" that you could load and replace as part of your portal, and "themes".
My online diary started with PHP-Nuke. Then went to PostNuke for many years. Then to Drupal, where it still is. 26 years of content hehe. (Wish I’d picked Wordpress instead of Drupal but too many links to change now)
I wouldn't think much of it. It was a popular design trend for a while there; some just never updated. I don't blame them, it's fairly decent on readability and minimalism.
I literally launched my development and web career on the back of this service as a broke early-20s person. Just seeing that link on HN gave me goosebumps. <3
afraid.org has been there offering free DNS hosting since the year 2000, 26 years
Whilst it would be nice to know their contingency and continuity plans, I feel like their history is a better indicator of the future than just a bunch of feel-good words that you'd likely find a way to interpret pesssimisticly anyway.
I'm super grateful for free projects, but people gotta understand that depending on the type of project users still need some kind of guarantees before they can invest time in them. And this has nothing to do with "being pessimistic". And if maintainers can give good answers to such questions, then this will only make their project stronger and everybody more happy.
The operators of this gratis, ~quarter-century-old service are doing just fine without bothering to please users like yourself. You're unhappy with it, but they've clearly made the right choice.
> And this whole attempt at making someone with legitimate questions look bad...
[Edit: actually, I think I misread your comment! I guess this is extra context for the people arguing that expecting some sort of contingency planning is unfair].
I use one of their "dynamic domain" as a stable address to point to my home computer : example.mooo.com instead of using the IP. They provide an endpoint for a cron to update this IP each X time.
I guess it could be seen as a relic considering most registrars/cdns/hosts are a "full package" now. In the days of old that wasn't exactly the case; where you bought your domain name, where you controlled your dns, and where your systems lived could all be different entities. Nowadays there are still reasons to do so...more control and less centralization are some. Not everyone wants to be under the thumb of the Amazons/Googles/Cloudflares.
similarly, someone please explain why a free citizen would voluntarily use a Google DNS service that builds profiles and extensive activity records on its users
I am a free tier sucker. I use it for testing DNS setups with our hosting platform. But I love it. Maybe some exposure helps to bring some paying customers.
This is awesome. I'll use them as a backup DNS service; the paid version is significantly cheaper than spinning up a new domain server with the cheapest provider I know.
Not to downplay my own skills, but their OpenBSD infrastructure is a good idea. They'll be up when my DNS servers are down.
One of the 5,000+ premium members. I've been using them as a secondary and for dynamic dns since... I have no idea for how long but much further back than 2015 when I started using a password manager that keeps history, probably circa 2005.
I've used FreeDNS on occasion for test domain names, one-off experiments, and similar. I'm very appreciative this exists, but there are some pain points that similar services handle better.
The domains are missing from the public suffix list. This impacts how cookies are handled by the domain names, with concerns the browser will allow software to set the cookie on the shared domain name instead of the subdomain. This can be a security problem. Getting added to the PSL may not happen: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/pull/79
It can be difficult to get a free HTTPS certificate for your subdomain. Let's Encrypt applies per-domain name rate limits and these domain names see lots of issuance requests. There's a process to lift those limits, but last I checked FreeDNS didn't use it. You can still, of course, pay for a certificate.
There's tons of abuse on free domains so you may find that your domain is blocked on various lists.
Here are some compelling alternatives I use now, which manage these issues better:
- https://messwithdns.net/ - Exceptionally well-made DNS console for learning DNS
- https://open-domains.com/ - Uses Cloudflare, great Discord group
- Even more: https://free.hrsn.dev/#/?id=domains
Doesn't Hurricane Electric do FreeDNS ? Haven't tested it but I assume with all their peering agreements they have decent latency
The entire publicsuffix thing is such a mess. The fact that project even exists is ridiculous. Why can this not be a dns setting?
They should have never allowed cross subdomain access for cookies. Every subdomain should be treated as completely unrelated to all other subdomains.
sigh
See, before the cloud, you used to deploy your code to actual physical servers. If your site became really popular you needed more than one server to run it.
Before commercial and open source load balancers became a thing we literally used HTTP redirects to distribute load. You might visit www.example.com and get redirected to www13.example.com, which was an actual box in a datacenter.
I don't think the internet would exist today if websites just randomly fell over once the number of simultaneous users exceeded the capacity of a single server.
Couldn't you just ghetto load balance by using internal DNS to round robin to a spread of servers with different internal IP ?
When I was at yahoo, we certainly had load balancers, but we didn't have super fancy load balancers that could separate traffic out by path, so each 'property' would use a different hostname (i worked on travel.yahoo.com, which is dead these many years), but we all shared a login cookie (and some other cookies).
We'd have certainly adapted if we couldn't share cookies, but it would have been a lot messier.
One of the complications that gets discussed is that there are way too many use cases with different requirements on what it means for domains to be related. The cookie problem is something browsers need to solve, so its perhaps reasonable that Mozilla (and volunteers) manage a list that focuses on that user case. But that's poorly suited for other use cases.
There's a lot of people thinking about this though. One somewhat related example is https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-manelidis-dnsop-domai..., which has a double-opt-in DNS TXT record mechanism. That draft and forthcoming discussions on the mailing list are a good place to understand the complexities here.
If, for example, you could trick a client into thinking "com" was not a public suffix, then from malicious.com you could set cookies on paypal.com
DNSSEC is not widely deployed, and so we cannot rely on the authenticity of DNS.
Maybe if we had DNSSEC, then we could rely on it for publicsuffix. Maybe lots of others things could be more easily solved if we had that too.
DNSSEC automation is coming, e.g. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc10026/. It might never become mainstream, but don't let anyone tell you that we couldn't benefit from having DNS authenticity!
because, like everything, bad guys would abuse it, causing a list of "bad publicsuffix" to exist, which is basically the same thing.
Could we just publish (and cache!) TXT records at the appropriate-level domains? E.g.:
Because it can't be. DNS tells you who's authoritative for a name, not who's allowed to be a security boundary — and those are different questions. Whether foo.co.uk is a registrable domain or a subdomain somebody sold you is a registry business decision, and ccTLDs disagree wildly about it. Some sell second-level, some don't, some changed their mind in 2014 and grandfathered everybody. There's no field in DNS that says "the boundary is here, trust me." So the browsers gave up and maintain a text file instead, which is ugly and correct.
The part that bites harder than cookies: PSL is the closest thing the web has to an entity table. If you live on a shared suffix — anything under mooo.com, dyndns.org, the ten thousand other free subdomain hosts — every crawler and every answer engine collapses you into the parent. Your page inherits the reputation of however many hundred thousand strangers happened to register next door. That's why free-subdomain sites are functionally invisible to search and to AI answers regardless of how good the content is. It's not a quality problem, it's a missing identity boundary, and there's no content fix for it.
The whole thread is basically that tradeoff in different clothes. Free DNS, free TLS, free hosting, free subdomain — every one of those gives you something real and quietly puts you in a bucket where nobody can tell you apart from the worst neighbor in it.
> Let's Encrypt applies per-domain name rate limits and these domain names see lots of issuance requests. There's a process to lift those limits.
I'm familiar with the process to lift those limits, and Let's Encrypt has been amenable to bumping the certs as high as 250,000 but balked at 500,000, saying, "This is too large for us to support"
(I run a DNS service nip.io / sslip.io, and lots of my users request certs, so I'm always bumping into the limits)
This is one of the most solid and longest lasting services online. Have been using it for almost two decades I think and nothing's changed.
> and nothing's changed
One thing has changed. At some point, they introduced the 'shared management queue', and any random person can attach a subdomain to my domains, and apparently I have to explicitly deny these. Until then, scammers can create a subdomain on my domain, point it to whatever IP they want, and use it for their nefarious purposes.
I get that I'm a freeloader: I haven't paid for FreeDNS, so I can't complain much. But this seems like a terrible 'feature'. If I were a pro subscriber, my domains would be private and therefore not available for scammers to use. I've migrated all but one of my domains away from the service (they were all trivially easy - just haven't finished the last one).
20+-year long user here, not an issue once. Josh replied to emails then and replies today still. Let's just hope there's someone to continue should something happen to him (chosen diety forbid).
Why dns is a topic eludes me because they all forward to root hint servers.
Why doesn't everyone just use their IANA resolvers?
You're conflating two different concepts: DNS hosting, and DNS resolving.
This service seems to offer hosting services, i.e. publishing your domain's records in the DNS in DNS authoritative servers.
A DNS resolution service looks up and maintains large caches of DNS data on your behalf, optimizing DNS lookups by not requiring your own device to recursively query many different DNS servers. These lookups start by querying the DNS root zone, which is published by the DNS's authoritative servers which are listed in the root hints file.
Set your system’s resolver to the iana roots and see what happens
Their backup DNS service is great, so you can run your own DNS with just one server.
https://nic.eu.org/ is also very cool for getting a domain name if paying for one is a challenge.
https://nic.eu.org is very nice but I haven't been able to register a domain there for a long time now
This looks so much like https://dns.he.net/ that it seems to me it can’t be a coincidence. Is this a case of copying a well known design or is there more to it?
Both are probably just old and reliable
It's possible they are both descendants from XName: https://web.archive.org/web/20120625081138/http://source.xna...
The "portal" layout style was very popular on Web 1.0, reminds me of PHP-Nuke.
omg, invoking php-nuke brings me back. fun era (recent php2shell wild ride notwithstanding). Honestly it's more like web 1.5 - not straight up hand written html but no wild client side stuff either.
And yes, there absolutely was a "look" that's a product of the technology of the time - tables for design, limited styling / js support, php "components" that you could load and replace as part of your portal, and "themes".
and it's so fast. clicks respond instantaneously even though the whole page has to be fetched and re-rendered.
we lost so much with SPAs and js everywhere.
htmx will save us!
My online diary started with PHP-Nuke. Then went to PostNuke for many years. Then to Drupal, where it still is. 26 years of content hehe. (Wish I’d picked Wordpress instead of Drupal but too many links to change now)
> PHP-Nuke
There's a name I haven't heard in a while!
Thank you - flashback achieved!
Doesn't look that similar to me, they both just look a bit old.
I wouldn't think much of it. It was a popular design trend for a while there; some just never updated. I don't blame them, it's fairly decent on readability and minimalism.
I literally launched my development and web career on the back of this service as a broke early-20s person. Just seeing that link on HN gave me goosebumps. <3
Happy freeloader for something like 15 years, can recommend
I have a couple domains (notably BBS.io) with them for people to use as ddns sub domains. Pretty happy overall.
I am interested, but I have some questions that don't seem to be addressed in the about us page:
How well is continuation guaranteed?
What if someone buys them? Or the maintainer stops for whatever reason?
afraid.org has been there offering free DNS hosting since the year 2000, 26 years
Whilst it would be nice to know their contingency and continuity plans, I feel like their history is a better indicator of the future than just a bunch of feel-good words that you'd likely find a way to interpret pesssimisticly anyway.
An answer to "what happens if the administrator of this dies?" doesn't require feel-good words to answer clearly.
I'm super grateful for free projects, but people gotta understand that depending on the type of project users still need some kind of guarantees before they can invest time in them. And this has nothing to do with "being pessimistic". And if maintainers can give good answers to such questions, then this will only make their project stronger and everybody more happy.
"gotta understand", "free projects", "need some kind of guarantees", "'invest' time", "give good answers".
Do you hear yourself?
It's more amazing that they don't realize that anything given or guaranteed wouldn't be worth anything, anyway.
Please explain what you mean in full sentences. Thank you.
“I'm super grateful for free projects, but”
No but. Be grateful. Do not ever expect some form of guarantee, continuity or support.
That’s it.
What nonsense. Can't I have questions before using something offered to me? Trade-offs are everywhere even with free things.
And this whole attempt at making someone with legitimate questions look bad ... sorry but it's ridiculous.
The operators of this gratis, ~quarter-century-old service are doing just fine without bothering to please users like yourself. You're unhappy with it, but they've clearly made the right choice.
> And this whole attempt at making someone with legitimate questions look bad...
No one here is assisting with that; it's all you.
I agree with you - but this project also offers pay-for services.
https://freedns.afraid.org/pricing/
[Edit: actually, I think I misread your comment! I guess this is extra context for the people arguing that expecting some sort of contingency planning is unfair].
Can someone explain how and why and when this would be used?
I use one of their "dynamic domain" as a stable address to point to my home computer : example.mooo.com instead of using the IP. They provide an endpoint for a cron to update this IP each X time.
This! I was using this in like middle school in 2006 or so to run my sites. Cool to see it still works.
I guess it could be seen as a relic considering most registrars/cdns/hosts are a "full package" now. In the days of old that wasn't exactly the case; where you bought your domain name, where you controlled your dns, and where your systems lived could all be different entities. Nowadays there are still reasons to do so...more control and less centralization are some. Not everyone wants to be under the thumb of the Amazons/Googles/Cloudflares.
This is what I thought from long ago but wasn't sure. Thanks
When you want to host your own nameserver but to lazy to configure it on your colocated server. Yet you have requirements that require a nameserver.
I've been paying customer for years. Branded nameservers are great, the web ui is janky and dated but seriously robust.
Support is lacking as for a while afraid.org has had an SSL cert error, very annoying.
similarly, someone please explain why a free citizen would voluntarily use a Google DNS service that builds profiles and extensive activity records on its users
Is this meant to be snarky? I don't get it. To them, it is a sincere question.
So to get this straight this is just hosted DNS? Like Route53? They aren’t a registrar or anything?
So you could pay for hosted DNS and then use them as the name server and other DNS records for multiple domains that you have?
It is like Route53. However, you cannot buy domain names from FreeDNS.
You can use FreeDNS as a name server and manage domain name records, like A records, cname, and MX records. You can have a dynamic domain name too.
You can also obtain free sub domain names from those who use FreeDNS as the name server and offer free sub domain names.
I will definitely keep them in mind. Thanks!
I am a free tier sucker. I use it for testing DNS setups with our hosting platform. But I love it. Maybe some exposure helps to bring some paying customers.
This is awesome. I'll use them as a backup DNS service; the paid version is significantly cheaper than spinning up a new domain server with the cheapest provider I know.
Not to downplay my own skills, but their OpenBSD infrastructure is a good idea. They'll be up when my DNS servers are down.
Isn't it FreeBSD?
Yes.
Every once in a while, HN surfaces absolute gems like this. Bookmarked and thanks to esher!
One of the 5,000+ premium members. I've been using them as a secondary and for dynamic dns since... I have no idea for how long but much further back than 2015 when I started using a password manager that keeps history, probably circa 2005.
> Members: 7,161,633 > Premium: 5,594 > Records: 13,834,581 > Zones: 1,276,010
That’s pretty cool.
Johsh is a great sysadmin.
If you're having trouble connecting, turn off your proxy/VPN.
Thanks for reminding me of yet another PHP based project I forgot to monitor during the last week
Site has been hugged to death.
Free services are never free. It is only free because someone else is paying.
I don’t use this but “hoping” that someone else will donate is not sustainable for them and unrealistic in the long term.
Maybe they should start charging.
> Free services are never free. It is only free because someone else is paying.
That’s what “free” means. Otherwise, nothing is “free” except maybe sunlight.
See also: <https://satwcomic.com/every-time>
(Repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21035982>)
Well, they've been around for 14 years. And they do charge for some services.
Looks like they've been around for 25 years.
Exactly. Because someone else is paying. It was never "free" and there is always a cost.
They still need to pay for the servers and bandwidth and fight the abuse by malicious users using the service for bad intentions.