I love bunny so much - I host 10+ (Hugo) websites there and I pay basically nothing (+ CDN, DNS, ...).
postepowanieadm · 2026-06-24 09:43:13 UTC
Have you managed to turn everything off? I had been playing with magic containers, turned everything off and then discovered every month I was charged 1usd + vat for nothing. A bit annoying.
Trollmann · 2026-06-24 09:50:58 UTC
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 · 2026-06-24 11:50:27 UTC
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.
phlsa · 2026-06-24 09:51:46 UTC
There seems to be a $1 minimum charge on all accounts, regardless of whether or not you use them[1]
So "free DNS hosting" is misleading marketing? (I signed up but wasn't asked for credit card info).
LoganDark · 2026-06-24 09:52:54 UTC
From TFA:
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend
khurs · 2026-06-24 09:59:15 UTC
how do you pay nothing? As CDN isn't free?
kenanfyi · 2026-06-24 10:49:04 UTC
Correct. In Bunny you have a $1/month minimum cost. I guess that's so low for them, that it's kinda nothing.
jaffa2 · 2026-06-24 09:48:41 UTC
So is this just a dns service? I can use their servers to service dns requests? The main webpage unfortunately has a lot of marketing speak that says a lot but doesnt really tell me what it is.
Quote “ At bunny.net, our mission has always been ambitious but focused: help make the internet hop faster.
To do that, we’ve built a massive global network spanning 119 locations and counting. Today, this network powers over 1.5 million websites and consistently delivers some of the fastest content delivery around the globe. But while deploying thousands of servers globally is an impressive feat on its own, the hardware itself does not explain how bunny.net is able to deliver such an impressive level of performance.
The real secret hides under the hood, embedded in the routing engine that directs every request, every user, and sends traffic exactly where it needs to go. That engine is Bunny DNS”
Ok… so what is it? Router? Dns? Software? Service? Upon reading again that para actually sounds a bit like AI slop, could explain it.
farfatched · 2026-06-24 09:51:45 UTC
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.
x13 · 2026-06-25 04:50:01 UTC
don't compare it to a public resolver like 1.1.1.1.
It's authoritative name servers for your domain. Compare it to AWS Route 53, Akamai Edge DNS, IBM NS1.
farfatched · 2026-06-25 07:36:15 UTC
I raised the comparison to distinguish between authoritative and recursive resolvers, since the parent's question was ambiguous: "So is this just a dns service?".
__jonas · 2026-06-24 10:45:21 UTC
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.
dizhn · 2026-06-24 09:50:49 UTC
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.
KingOfCoders · 2026-06-24 09:54:07 UTC
You had some - millions (?) of - DNS queries free in the past.
khurs · 2026-06-24 10:02:01 UTC
Yes. Many others are free with no $1 minimum (e.g. Cloudflare)
Well except of the people that may solve the damn captchas (:
khurs · 2026-06-24 10:15:12 UTC
Cloudflare's business model appears to be wait till someone is generating lots of bandwidth and then give them 30 days to move up a tier or be closed down.
I've read reports of companies on the business plan being strong armed into signing Enterprise plans with 1 year upfront.
It's a listed company with revenue expectations, and VERY good at marketing itself, but it's free tier of CDN/DDOS to start off with is a good deal.
trick-or-treat · 2026-06-24 10:50:16 UTC
Move up a tier or move somewhere where it costs even more. That seems kinda reasonable, really.
Barbing · 2026-06-24 14:57:00 UTC
CloudFlare uses that Slack Hack Club model?
Chu4eeno · 2026-06-24 15:29:56 UTC
Cloudflare's business model was to protect DDoS "providers"/booters for free, so DDoS became something everyone had to worry about (before cloudflare they tended to DDoS eachother), and then sell the cure.
Krebs wrote some rather scathing posts about them when they were starting up.
chaz6 · 2026-06-24 11:12:04 UTC
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.
dizhn · 2026-06-24 12:09:22 UTC
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.
dizhn · 2026-06-24 10:27:04 UTC
First time I am hearing of paying for DNS resolution but I am just a civilian.
iso1631 · 2026-06-24 11:07:17 UTC
route53 charge somewhere in the region of $0.40 per million queries
anonzzzies · 2026-06-24 11:09:16 UTC
Aws charges for everything including that.
Scaled · 2026-06-24 10:39:04 UTC
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!
bcye · 2026-06-24 10:11:10 UTC
They were charging for nameserver hosting. The main draw are some advanced programmatic features for (geo) routing, scripting, etc.
summarity · 2026-06-24 10:19:52 UTC
Their DNS is also scriptable, it’s not just a name server
Havoc · 2026-06-24 11:26:35 UTC
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 · 2026-06-24 11:53:31 UTC
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 · 2026-06-24 12:10:23 UTC
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.
inigyou · 2026-06-24 12:33:01 UTC
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.
Chu4eeno · 2026-06-24 15:27:45 UTC
Isn't mullvad european?
dewey · 2026-06-24 16:40:40 UTC
Yes, but nobody is by default held liable for their anonymous customers. Otherwise you would not be able to buy anything with cash any more.
inigyou · 2026-06-25 20:54:57 UTC
In Sweden you can't. Mullvad is an unusual exception. Sweden is full cashless.
notsound · 2026-06-24 16:43:28 UTC
Most European hosting providers don't KYC. Infrastructure providers are rarely held liable for customer actions in Europe. Most enforcement around this sort of thing is around sanctions violations (Stark Industries).
shimman · 2026-06-24 15:49:23 UTC
You don't need a credit card on file, you can prepay and use that balance instead.
I'll also say that I've used around 140 gigs of bandwidth the last two months and my costs has only been <$2. Worth it to me, and doubly worth it to avoid the tyranny of big tech (which includes cloudflare).
Havoc · 2026-06-24 12:31:38 UTC
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.
dust-jacket · 2026-06-24 14:18:56 UTC
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.
dwedge · 2026-06-24 20:04:15 UTC
Yeah I ruled them out months ago because it was $1, I saw this post and was about to reconsider them and in my case it's the same as it was.
dwedge · 2026-06-24 20:03:15 UTC
It is bad, because I don't use Bunny for anything else and so this made it paid DNS for me, so when I was migrating DNS a few months ago it made me rule them out.
toast0 · 2026-06-24 20:02:58 UTC
> 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.
tao_oat · 2026-06-24 09:55:40 UTC
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.
rahimnathwani · 2026-06-24 09:59:07 UTC
That's not their fault, though. There's no perfectly reliable way to enumerate the DNS records for a particular domain.
farfatched · 2026-06-24 09:59:36 UTC
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 · 2026-06-24 15:48:35 UTC
I feel like I'm missing something, AXFR?
meeb · 2026-06-24 19:34:41 UTC
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.
Chu4eeno · 2026-06-24 20:49:33 UTC
iirc at least some providers let you whitelist AXFR for migrating away from them, but seems like it is usually only if you pay enough (i. e. restricted to enterprise plans).
Since it's much rarer than I thought, I guess it makes sense bunny haven't implemented support for ingesting with AXFR.
x13 · 2026-06-25 04:45:16 UTC
AXFR is not supported by AWS Route 53, Google Cloud DNS, Azure, Rackspace, Hetzner, Bunny, Alibaba Cloud DNS, No-IP, nor Tencent.
It is supported by Akamai Edge DNS, Oracle Cloud, enterprise Cloudflare accounts, IBM NS1 Connect, ClouDNS, CloudFloorDNS, and DNS Made Easy.
sc6782682 · 2026-06-24 10:45:54 UTC
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.
Lucasoato · 2026-06-24 10:02:45 UTC
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 · 2026-06-24 10:12:07 UTC
Well that's a strange way of expressing competitiveness when Hetzner is still vastly cheaper than those 3 cloud providers, despite those cost increases.
Imustaskforhelp · 2026-06-24 10:20:47 UTC
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 :-(
chpatrick · 2026-06-24 10:27:23 UTC
Hetzner can't magically buy cheap hardware and prices have multiplied the last year.
Imustaskforhelp · 2026-06-24 10:39:08 UTC
I understand that and I am not denying that but it would be now unfair to say that Hetzner belongs in its own category as there are now other alternatives who do compete with Hetzner in its pricing, who also I suppose weren't able to magically buy cheap hardware but I suppose some of them might've lucked out with good deals beforehand and spare-capacity.
Overall I am unsure of how much of the thing was under Hetzner's control itself or not in terms of raising the prices given Ramflation but in deep part I am saddened by it rather than angry on the state of how the whole situation turned out to be, and I wish nothing but good for hetzner as they move past this ramflation and hopefully people are able to give a look at some smaller shops as well which are made of mostly lovely people as well.
I hope that more people look at smaller hosting providers in general who were previously unable to compete at the level of hetzner but now are actually able to do so. I recommend trying them out and talking with them and using it for atleast hobby projects and hopefully even serious projects as I know some hosting providers smaller in scale than Hetzner but are something on which I might feel as comfortable as Hetzner on deploying, if not a bit more because sadly for better or for worse Hetzner is quite strict in some aspects.
chpatrick · 2026-06-24 11:11:13 UTC
How are the smaller hosting providers going to buy cheap hardware?
Imustaskforhelp · 2026-06-24 11:25:34 UTC
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$/yr vps's as much as they earn from the word of mouth (TNAHosting ftw) and thinking of it as (amortizing?) advertisement costs.
Which is why considering all of this and the fact that I was a very massive Hetzner fan back in the day pre price increase, I have felt like the way Hetzner has done things just doesn't feel very Hetzner-y and that there were better ways to manage it and even if not, then there are better shops out there welcoming you, waiting for you to give them a shot as well. I have written another comment detailing some other MASSIVE list of providers as well if this interests ya.
rekabis · 2026-06-24 16:14:43 UTC
The problem is that the company is burning existing customers - for whom the hardware has already been long purchased - to subsidize new customers coming in during this time of higher hardware costs.
And burning existing customers costs a lot more than soaking new customers. Churn always costs far more in lost revenue than a slowdown in new customers. Plus, it impacts market image in a deeply negative way.
mkesper · 2026-06-24 17:19:26 UTC
But existing resources were not affected.
piva00 · 2026-06-24 10:32:15 UTC
What is comparable to Hetzner in price/scale/features?
Imustaskforhelp · 2026-06-24 11:15:01 UTC
If you want very small servers: either get a 7$/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.
enoeht · 2026-06-24 12:15:42 UTC
Quick glance on those two hosters and i cannot find these 7$ / y prices.
BenjiWiebe · 2026-06-24 15:21:46 UTC
Me neither, but I found the $3 option with an even quicker glance.
I also recommend looking at serververify which is a website created by the creator of colocrossing iirc: https://serververify.com
I have personally used serverdeals.cc and vpspricetracker.com in the past and they are some good resources BUT most of what I have snatched are within flash-sales of various kinds, whether just for as providers running it for an advertisement way or when I was using a netcup instance on their christmas/Advent calendar deals.
Hope i am able to help and take care, my friend.
selcuka · 2026-06-24 23:54:00 UTC
Such deals come and go, but there are other hosts with similar pricing:
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 ?
selcuka · 2026-06-24 23:57:34 UTC
There are many deals at LowEndBox. Here is a $10/year example (Los Angeles or New York):
Many smaller providers have reasonable price/features but you need to dig in a comparison site or just generally to find them I guess. Like e.g serversearcher.com serverhunter etc
frevib · 2026-06-24 21:02:33 UTC
Scaleway and OVH. Upcloud close second.
heybales · 2026-06-24 11:06:21 UTC
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.
AussieWog93 · 2026-06-24 11:12:17 UTC
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.
khurs · 2026-06-24 11:25:58 UTC
>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!
utrack · 2026-06-24 12:50:08 UTC
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.
derkades · 2026-06-24 22:00:42 UTC
Existing hardware can fail. 1.25x is very reasonable given the current insanity.
Imustaskforhelp · 2026-06-24 11:34:40 UTC
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.
whiterock · 2026-06-24 11:59:58 UTC
mind sharing what you found in your search losing your sanity? :D
Contabo does have some steal factor involved, unfortunately and their support times aren't great though many people have quite differing and polarizing experience about them or so I have heard as I haven't really tried them personally.
But its good that contabo is able to be working for ya, They are quite price competitive and the issue with them as said prior really isn't their price so much as though all the other things.
So I am happy for you that it works out for you in the end! :-D
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.
ymolodtsov · 2026-06-24 14:09:41 UTC
Existing instances don't get a new price until you resize them.
Comments
[1] https://bunny.net/pricing/#:~:text=%241%20monthly%20minimum
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend
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.
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.
It's authoritative name servers for your domain. Compare it to AWS Route 53, Akamai Edge DNS, IBM NS1.
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.
>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.
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.
Krebs wrote some rather scathing posts about them when they were starting up.
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.
I'll also say that I've used around 140 gigs of bandwidth the last two months and my costs has only been <$2. Worth it to me, and doubly worth it to avoid the tyranny of big tech (which includes cloudflare).
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Excluding NSEC-style enumeration, which is not always available.)
Since it's much rarer than I thought, I guess it makes sense bunny haven't implemented support for ingesting with AXFR.
It is supported by Akamai Edge DNS, Oracle Cloud, enterprise Cloudflare accounts, IBM NS1 Connect, ClouDNS, CloudFloorDNS, and DNS Made Easy.
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'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.
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 :-(
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.
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$/yr vps's as much as they earn from the word of mouth (TNAHosting ftw) and thinking of it as (amortizing?) advertisement costs.
Which is why considering all of this and the fact that I was a very massive Hetzner fan back in the day pre price increase, I have felt like the way Hetzner has done things just doesn't feel very Hetzner-y and that there were better ways to manage it and even if not, then there are better shops out there welcoming you, waiting for you to give them a shot as well. I have written another comment detailing some other MASSIVE list of providers as well if this interests ya.
And burning existing customers costs a lot more than soaking new customers. Churn always costs far more in lost revenue than a slowdown in new customers. Plus, it impacts market image in a deeply negative way.
The thing after Hetzner's price increase is that there isn't one size fits all anymore and I guess it might not impact people like me who knows in my opinion, many providers but in this situation its a net loss for many who might be paying higher prices. So here is my small list:
if you want vps that are behind nat: @backtogeek at (tierhive.net) is your guy. He's on hackernews as well.
If you want a very small vps with high egress: Upcloud is an interesting option as they provide 33TB (100mbps) even on their smallest machines. Ionos is a good option as well.
Dedirock/host-c are good for storage backup. Don't rely on their reliability or bandwidth but rely on having multiple deplyoments on different such servers for good backups.
Main: OVHCloud/Greencloud/onidel/buyvm and to a lesser degree Netcup as well are some good verdicts. I like layer7 and servarica as well and I have personally talked in direct messages to the person behind loclix.io
I personally use TNAHosting/Avahosting 7$/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.
https://tnahosting.net/hybrid-vps/
I had bought from TNAhosting during a flash-sale
Even at 7$/yr vps there are multiple providers with layering rates of confidence within the provider.
Here are some resources that I can give:
https://vpspricetracker.com
https://lowendtalk.com
here is a post by a Lowendtalk member about some of these price comparison websites
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/215318/price-comparison-si...
From the post:
https://www.serverhunter.com/
https://serverdeals.cc/
https://vpspricetracker.com
https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/best_vps
https://www.hostfind.co.uk/web-hosting/vps-hosting/
https://hostingsift.com/hosting?type=vps
I also recommend looking at serververify which is a website created by the creator of colocrossing iirc: https://serververify.com
I have personally used serverdeals.cc and vpspricetracker.com in the past and they are some good resources BUT most of what I have snatched are within flash-sales of various kinds, whether just for as providers running it for an advertisement way or when I was using a netcup instance on their christmas/Advent calendar deals.
Hope i am able to help and take care, my friend.
https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/
https://cloudserver.net/billing/index.php?rp=/store/custom-p...
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!
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.
https://lowendtalk.com
But its good that contabo is able to be working for ya, They are quite price competitive and the issue with them as said prior really isn't their price so much as though all the other things.
So I am happy for you that it works out for you in the end! :-D
Hope it is able to be of help and it helps ya, take care!
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.