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by ignoramous 1616 days ago
> ...grew out to become a worldwide multi-node adblocking DNS network with thousands of concurrent users around the globe

This is hard because DNS going down means Internet is down for anyone who isn't savvy to check and change a failing DNS upstream. And when your users are global, it might mean some really angry users if you couldn't fix emergent issues for hours on end. I run a public content-blocking DNS stub resolver. We made the decision (and subsequently paid the price upfront in terms of engineering) to host it on Fly.io (DoT), Deno Deploy (DoH), and Cloudflare Workers (DoH) to specifically avoid sysadmin tasks for what's a free offering, and the code is licensed under MPLv2 in case anyone wants to run their own stub resolver on those platforms.

We haven't had much down time, if any at all, in the past one and half years we have been functional. It costs us $1 per 2tps (transactions per second: ~6M requests) for a month. The free-tier of these platforms should cover personal workloads (3 to 5 devices: ~1M requests), just fine.

> I will make sure to keep the domain registered and under my control for the next year, to prevent adhole.org from being abused by DNS hijackers/spoofers.

I think they could, if they want to, transfer the ownership of the domain to another public content-blocking resolver, after a year has passed. There are two or three such providers that have a very solid business backing them up to support such a migration.

3 comments

> it might mean some really angry users

> a free offering

You see, anything free should be treated as a privilege, not expected to last forever. Have you considered what you can do when the free providers either kick the can, or start charging fair value?

Yes, but that isn't how support works. If you can avoid angry wrong people gumming up your support channels, the better.
Or, if you’re done with the free project, you can just close the support channels.
One thing that could work to warn users of impending shutdowns is to use the captive portal detection browsers come with to redirect users to a page with information before shutting the service down. This way the administrators can inform their users without having to mess with DNS traffic and commit mitm crimes just to get people to switch DNS providers.
> $1 per 2tps DNS traffic

What are tps? I'm not familiar with the term and couldn't turn up much. T per second?

transactions per second I assume