The domains are missing from the public suffix list. This impacts how cookies are handled by the domain names, with concerns the browser will allow software to set the cookie on the shared domain name instead of the subdomain. This can be a security problem. Getting added to the PSL may not happen: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/pull/79
It can be difficult to get a free HTTPS certificate for your subdomain. Let's Encrypt applies per-domain name rate limits and these domain names see lots of issuance requests. There's a process to lift those limits, but last I checked FreeDNS didn't use it. You can still, of course, pay for a certificate.
There's tons of abuse on free domains so you may find that your domain is blocked on various lists.
Here are some compelling alternatives I use now, which manage these issues better:
- https://messwithdns.net/ - Exceptionally well-made DNS console for learning DNS
- https://open-domains.com/ - Uses Cloudflare, great Discord group
- Even more: https://free.hrsn.dev/#/?id=domains
See, before the cloud, you used to deploy your code to actual physical servers. If your site became really popular you needed more than one server to run it.
Before commercial and open source load balancers became a thing we literally used HTTP redirects to distribute load. You might visit www.example.com and get redirected to www13.example.com, which was an actual box in a datacenter.
I don't think the internet would exist today if websites just randomly fell over once the number of simultaneous users exceeded the capacity of a single server.
We'd have certainly adapted if we couldn't share cookies, but it would have been a lot messier.
So no, you cannot reliably control load balancing using one domain name pointing to multiple IP addresses. (IP anycast is better suited, but much harder to implement)
There's a lot of people thinking about this though. One somewhat related example is https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-manelidis-dnsop-domai..., which has a double-opt-in DNS TXT record mechanism. That draft and forthcoming discussions on the mailing list are a good place to understand the complexities here.
DNSSEC is not widely deployed, and so we cannot rely on the authenticity of DNS.
Maybe if we had DNSSEC, then we could rely on it for publicsuffix. Maybe lots of others things could be more easily solved if we had that too.
DNSSEC automation is coming, e.g. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc10026/. It might never become mainstream, but don't let anyone tell you that we couldn't benefit from having DNS authenticity!
host -t TXT github.io.
etld_depth=2The part that bites harder than cookies: PSL is the closest thing the web has to an entity table. If you live on a shared suffix — anything under mooo.com, dyndns.org, the ten thousand other free subdomain hosts — every crawler and every answer engine collapses you into the parent. Your page inherits the reputation of however many hundred thousand strangers happened to register next door. That's why free-subdomain sites are functionally invisible to search and to AI answers regardless of how good the content is. It's not a quality problem, it's a missing identity boundary, and there's no content fix for it.
The whole thread is basically that tradeoff in different clothes. Free DNS, free TLS, free hosting, free subdomain — every one of those gives you something real and quietly puts you in a bucket where nobody can tell you apart from the worst neighbor in it.
I'm familiar with the process to lift those limits, and Let's Encrypt has been amenable to bumping the certs as high as 250,000 but balked at 500,000, saying, "This is too large for us to support"
(I run a DNS service nip.io / sslip.io, and lots of my users request certs, so I'm always bumping into the limits)
One thing has changed. At some point, they introduced the 'shared management queue', and any random person can attach a subdomain to my domains, and apparently I have to explicitly deny these. Until then, scammers can create a subdomain on my domain, point it to whatever IP they want, and use it for their nefarious purposes.
I get that I'm a freeloader: I haven't paid for FreeDNS, so I can't complain much. But this seems like a terrible 'feature'. If I were a pro subscriber, my domains would be private and therefore not available for scammers to use. I've migrated all but one of my domains away from the service (they were all trivially easy - just haven't finished the last one).
Why doesn't everyone just use their IANA resolvers?
This service seems to offer hosting services, i.e. publishing your domain's records in the DNS in DNS authoritative servers.
A DNS resolution service looks up and maintains large caches of DNS data on your behalf, optimizing DNS lookups by not requiring your own device to recursively query many different DNS servers. These lookups start by querying the DNS root zone, which is published by the DNS's authoritative servers which are listed in the root hints file.
https://nic.eu.org/ is also very cool for getting a domain name if paying for one is a challenge.
And yes, there absolutely was a "look" that's a product of the technology of the time - tables for design, limited styling / js support, php "components" that you could load and replace as part of your portal, and "themes".
we lost so much with SPAs and js everywhere.
htmx will save us!
There's a name I haven't heard in a while!
How well is continuation guaranteed?
What if someone buys them? Or the maintainer stops for whatever reason?
Whilst it would be nice to know their contingency and continuity plans, I feel like their history is a better indicator of the future than just a bunch of feel-good words that you'd likely find a way to interpret pesssimisticly anyway.
Do you hear yourself?
No but. Be grateful. Do not ever expect some form of guarantee, continuity or support.
That’s it.
And this whole attempt at making someone with legitimate questions look bad ... sorry but it's ridiculous.
> And this whole attempt at making someone with legitimate questions look bad...
No one here is assisting with that; it's all you.
https://freedns.afraid.org/pricing/
[Edit: actually, I think I misread your comment! I guess this is extra context for the people arguing that expecting some sort of contingency planning is unfair].
I've been paying customer for years. Branded nameservers are great, the web ui is janky and dated but seriously robust.
Support is lacking as for a while afraid.org has had an SSL cert error, very annoying.
So you could pay for hosted DNS and then use them as the name server and other DNS records for multiple domains that you have?
You can use FreeDNS as a name server and manage domain name records, like A records, cname, and MX records. You can have a dynamic domain name too.
You can also obtain free sub domain names from those who use FreeDNS as the name server and offer free sub domain names.
Not to downplay my own skills, but their OpenBSD infrastructure is a good idea. They'll be up when my DNS servers are down.
That’s pretty cool.
Free services are never free. It is only free because someone else is paying.
I don’t use this but “hoping” that someone else will donate is not sustainable for them and unrealistic in the long term.
Maybe they should start charging.
That’s what “free” means. Otherwise, nothing is “free” except maybe sunlight.
(Repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21035982>)
They still need to pay for the servers and bandwidth and fight the abuse by malicious users using the service for bad intentions.