We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself
bunny.net548 points by dabinat 7 hours ago
548 points by dabinat 7 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.
Well that's a strange way of expressing competitiveness when Hetzner is still vastly cheaper than those 3 cloud providers, despite those cost increases.
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.
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.
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 :-(
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.
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.
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.
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.
mind sharing what you found in your search losing your sanity? :D
>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!
I suspect that the pressure on this old infra had increased (because the customers started moving onto it); from the market POV it makes sense to put a bit more pressure on the customer tbh.
Hetzner can't magically buy cheap hardware and prices have multiplied the last year.
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.
How are the smaller hosting providers going to buy cheap hardware?
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.
What is comparable to Hetzner in price/scale/features?
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.
are there US based providers i.e data centers in the US you recommend for cheap VPS like the one the $7/11 year VPS options you mention since most of those are European based ?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
My experience with all EU providers so far is yes, you do have to prepay, I think Hetzner for exemple was 20 euros when I signed up years ago?
Most likely they are unwilling to let customers pay later without any guarantee that they're good faith and solvent. Maybe it is a cultural thing? It's only my personal opinion but it never struck me as unreasonable.
Assuming they've hosted you for 3 full years, I wouldn't mind the 10 euros. Even small sites need all infra to work. The fact that your site is small only means it costs less in transfer.
> 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: $1
First one didn't happen, so I don't know what the threshold is. But don't sell me a credit based system if it can go in the negative. Again for a progress bar that doesn't represent negatives.
You are correct on the billing front. I checked the dashboard and I misremembered the day I switched off my resources. June was a slow moving month and I though it happened last month!
I'll retract my claim in the previous comment if I still can edit.
How much do you pay per month? Never expect a real human tech expert if you only pay 10$/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.
So you unhappy with their pricing policy, which sounds understandable. But what were you expecting the support to do about this?
> 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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
Interesting side thought, dunno if it would give any real indication, but I assume the difference between pasting a bunch of text vs typing each character would seem like a potential indicator (for now) whether someone might have used AI to respond.
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.
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
> That sounds like a GPT trope
It sounds natural to me. Remember that most people here are non-native speakers, including OP.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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/
> 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?
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.
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!
They have a $1 minimum spend across all services. You can effectively host unlimited static sites for $1.
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.
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.
It's not purely prepaid otherwise I wouldn't be charged into negative (see my other comment in this thread).
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.
My point was to correct one claim in your previous comment.
It's not an accurate correction. It's prepaid with an ability to incur a small amount of negative balance, partly for protection against downtime or data loss and partly so the systems can have some time to shut off (it would be hard to suspend service immediately across all services). However it is purely prepaid in that they don't provide a postpaid option.
That's a very uncharitable way of dismissing my claim that the parent claim of the service stopping automatically when you go over your credits is not true.
That's one thing. The second thing, I'm happy for you that you have more information about their pricing system than their pricing page and terms of service page state.
Exactly!
I once had some pretty serious DoS attack, but fortunately, I didn't had to pay more than what was pre-paid.
> 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.
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.
They were charging for nameserver hosting. The main draw are some advanced programmatic features for (geo) routing, scripting, etc.
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
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.
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.
KYC is a thing in Europe. Internet infrastructure businesses won't do business anonymously as they'd be held liable for anything their anonymous customer did.
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.
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.
You had some - millions (?) of - DNS queries free in the past.
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!
Yes. Many others are free with no $1 minimum (e.g. Cloudflare)
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.
You only have to have them be your domain's name servers. Domains can stay at another registrar. This is pretty risk-free. They didn't even used to be a registrar until recently and they don't support registering all tlds so this always worked.
something something are the product
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.
Move up a tier or move somewhere where it costs even more. That seems kinda reasonable, really.
Not _quite_ in this case, since the free plan improves everyone's experience: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/
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.
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.
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.
Something still has to locate the resource you want, and that will involve something equivalent to DNS.
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?
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.
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.
Their website loads really fast. Its sad that this is remarkable, but it really is.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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'
They offer more services than just DNS.. their DNS service is "free", their other services aren't.
> 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?
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.
Well, AWS is an example of provide who does charges for it, starting at $0.4/million queries...
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.
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.)
That's not their fault, though. There's no perfectly reliable way to enumerate the DNS records for a particular domain.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Domain Registrars usually have shitty, subpar DNS eg. without Anycast or DNSSEC.
If i have understood correctly, Anycast is not feature of DNS but a feature of BGP.
Otherwise, that is my observation also.
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.
I read this headline as "DNS free" and was intrigued, like they would be distributing hosts files or something.
This is good news! For anybody wondering, there is a terraform provider available.
https://registry.terraform.io/providers/BunnyWay/bunnynet/la...
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.
I think it is a step in the right direction for bunny to be a competitive for the people on hobby/self hosting. But I think that having a free tier for CDN is what makes cloudflare attractive (Among other things).
I can finally automate our wildcard certs. Our current DNS host doesn’t have an API.
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.
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 ;)
I love bunny so much - I host 10+ (Hugo) websites there and I pay basically nothing (+ CDN, DNS, ...).
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.
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
So "free DNS hosting" is misleading marketing? (I signed up but wasn't asked for credit card info).
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.
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.
From TFA:
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend
how do you pay nothing? As CDN isn't free?
Correct. In Bunny you have a $1/month minimum cost. I guess that's so low for them, that it's kinda nothing.
How would I quantitatively test which dns server is the fastest one available to me?
Great news, but CDN doesn't have free tier like Cloudflare's unfortunately, so not an option for my projects ATM.
really excited for bunny, i am sure things (dns import) would be fixed eventually
I wish they provided an alternative to Cloudflare WARP as well.
Free secondary or are people supposed to make them primary and manage their DNS through Bunny? If primary that is the same sales technique Cloudflare used. It works, once one's DNS is managed there enabling CDN features is just clicking buttons.
200,000,000,000÷30÷24÷60÷60÷119
648 queries/second/location.
Obviously not all locations are equal and not all seconds or minutes of the day are.
Indeed an impressive scale.
Amazing, thanks for doing that. I just moved all my websites to Bunny CDN a couple of months ago, and I couldn't be happier. Great product, great website and interface.
Is this faster than Cloudflare?
I do not mind paying for everything as long as there is good ddos protection as getting charged for stuff I cannot help is an immediate cancel and also I won’t pay, come get me.
Not entirely free. Bunny account it-self costs 12$/year.
> We implemented DNSSEC with NSEC Black Lies
That's pretty cool. Learned something new today.
Best wishes in your new business model!
congrats
seems both Bunny & Cloudflare - both have a SQLite product - has anyone used the sqlite products ? & what are your thoughts & opinions
Interesting, but I have too much stuff configured in Cloudflare :<
Excellent commercial move!
Bunny.net is awesome!
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.
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.
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.
Biggest feature is dns loadbalancing.
They use .NET. Considering this choice, I doubt they will ever be as good as Cloudflare
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
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!
The mismatch between how great Bunny is giving away free DNS, and the actual reality that I can't open an account and get free DNS from them is jarring and verging on dishonest.
Saying stuff is free when it's not in the small print feels like a distinctly American Tech thing to do, which is an odd angle for a company trying to be an EU alternative to cloudflare.
“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.”
This is smart. Ensures you have valid payment information, which implies a financial institution is running KYC on your customer. That reduces fraud and abuse while also reducing friction for real users to increase their spend within your ecosystem when a new product catches their eye.
Nice thank you so much!
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.
That's not the cookie banner. It was just a pop-up that said "Built in the EU" and goes on about how they're privacy-first, transparent, etc...
This is the cookie banner: https://i.imgur.com/CIBQBib.png
This is what you saw: https://i.imgur.com/rp6vbLy.png
What you're referring to is not a cookie banner at all (I suppose you didn't read the text, only the buttons).
The actual cookie banner merely says "We use cookies to improve your user experience. Learn more" and has a close button.
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?
I mean, that cookie popup saying there's no need for a cookie popup is probably there because someone complained there's no cookie popup...
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."
so its authoritative dns and not free dns resolution like 1.1.1.1
how do they compare to cloudflare? It would be nice to see a comparison chart
Finally! Now it becomes economic for us to make the move! Goodbye CloudFlare!
more competition is a good thing, always welcome for alternative
Flagging dishonest advertisement.
'Its free until its not haha!'
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a free dns service? wow that's insane.
