We’re making Bunny DNS free

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

For the people asking what kind of DNS service this is, content or proxy: You have to look 'Bunny DNS' up in the products menu and from there follow the hyperlink to the doco.

* https://docs.bunny.net/dns

So it's content DNS service; with server-side resource record shuffling; and with JavaScript, and badly written examples that don't check the question type, just to make it weird.

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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

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.

Amazing news!

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

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

What would be even nicer: - Make your privacy policy less shady so we're sure you're not sending data to Hyperscalers subject to Cloud Act - Support the Vary header so we can build a real, self hosted, european Vercel alternative

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.

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'

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

Great news, but CDN doesn't have free tier like Cloudflare's unfortunately, so not an option for my projects ATM.

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.

How would I quantitatively test which dns server is the fastest one available to me?

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.

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.

I wish they provided an alternative to Cloudflare WARP as well.

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.

Not entirely free. Bunny account it-self costs 12$/year.

Is this faster than Cloudflare?

really excited for bunny, i am sure things (dns import) would be fixed eventually

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!

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 :<

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.

> We implemented DNSSEC with NSEC Black Lies

That's pretty cool. Learned something new today.

Best wishes in your new business model!

Bunny.net is awesome!

Biggest feature is dns loadbalancing.

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

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.

They use .NET. Considering this choice, I doubt they will ever be as good as Cloudflare

Excellent commercial move!

“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!

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!

congrats

Wow they made something free that I’ve used for 30+ years and have never paid for in my life. Amazing, what an accomplishment! What Herculean effort it must have taken!

What the hell am I missing here?

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.