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.
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 :-(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-(
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.
What is comparable to Hetzner in price/scale/features?
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.
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.
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.
Their DNS is also scriptable, it’s not just a name server
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!
First time I am hearing of paying for DNS resolution but I am just a civilian.
Yes. Many others are free with no $1 minimum (e.g. Cloudflare)
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/
Well except of the people that may solve the damn captchas (:
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!
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.)
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.
That's not their fault, though. There's no perfectly reliable way to enumerate the DNS records for a particular domain.
Bunny.net is awesome!
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. It sad that this is remarkable, but it really is.
Damn, you're right. Ugh, everything else is truly molasses.
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
Yes, that is what I pay ("basically nothing")
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.
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.
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
a free dns service? wow that's insane.
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.
Interesting, but I have too much stuff configured in Cloudflare :<
All the more reason to use this? :)
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.