Following on from my post last year about the upcoming new charges in AWS for public IPv4 addresses, I’ve found more optimisations some might find useful.
I like to have things all “under one roof” but often the financial savings are worth having a couple of different suppliers. AWS charge users for hosting DNS Zones: $0.50 per month per hosted zone (first 25 domains) and $0.40 per billion queries. Then add 20% VAT to that.
This does not sound much but for a home user with multiple domains things can start to get a bit pricey. To make some savings I installed and configured bind onto an existing Raspberry Pi 4 device I use at home and hosted DNS myself. This worked a treat but not without a few issues:
1) It’s not highly available so I would need a second DNS server somewhere else
2) I don’t have a UPS so it would be affected by power cuts.
The show-stopper is that same registries will only accept “known” DNS servers which prevented me hosting, for example, my .com domains.
After some searching with my favourite internet search engine I found Cloudflare. It turns out that their “Basic” and FREE tier supports DNS hosting. Having moved nameservers I’m now saving just shy of £100.00 per year. Not only that, their .io domains are $45.00 and AWS charge $71.00.