A few years ago I came across the On the Metal podcast episode with Kenneth Finnegan about setting up the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange. It sent me down a rabbit hole I haven’t climbed out of.

I'm a software and systems engineer by background, and I am not a network engineer. I’d dabbled with DNS and mail servers before, but always wondered how everything actually tied together at the infrastructure level.

Kenneth’s interview awoke something in me. I went all in, taught myself BGP, figured out how ASNs work, got my own IP prefix and eventually racked my own servers at a local datacenter here in Singapore.

TheLittleHost came out of that. A small DNS hosting service built on infrastructure I fully own, with an Anycast network now spanning Singapore, Tokyo, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Frankfurt.

I built it because I wanted to run the DNS host I always wanted. One without ecosystem lock-in, that comes with a basic API that CLIs can plug into and have the ability to quickly import and export your zones and records in standard BIND format.

Right now it supports most major standard record types (RFC 1035) including HTTPS and TLSA, TTLs as low as 5s, a REST API, and full zone import/export. Free-tier is just a single zone and signup is just an email and password.

Honestly, it’s not the most feature-rich DNS host out there and I am not trying to be one. I wanted to focus on doing one thing well and owning the full stack than to add on features I cannot stand behind.

DNS is the first primitive I am working on. I’m building towards a more composable infrastructure stack for example, CDN on your own hardware, load-balancing and more. The focus is on keeping things open: no black boxes, no lock-in and on infrastructure you actually own.

It's small by design and I want to keep it that way. Posting here to get some feedback, share my journey, and hopefully inspire a few people to get their hands into Internet infrastructure, the same way others inspired me.

https://www.thelittlehost.com/dns

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47398368

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

Its been pretty fun cosplaying as an network engineer, and now I'm building out an Anycast network for a few ideas that I'm working on.

Its nothing too revolutionary or new, but I'm proud that I've built them from ground up and all running on my own infrastructure.

- DNS Authoritative Hosting - https://thelittlehost.com/dns/ - Quietnet - A family-focused internet filter - https://quietnet.app

I'm also getting ready to launch https://relaye.io, which was my personal tool I built to support my devops consultancy.

The first is a DNS blocker called Quietnet - https://quietnet.app. Its born out of my interest in infrastructure and I wanted to build an opininated DNS blocker that helps mom and pops be safer on the Internet. At the end of the day its just the typical Pi-hole on the Cloud but with my personal interest in providing stronger privacy for our users while keeping their families safe.

The second, is a small newsletter aggregator tool called Newsletters.love - https://newsletters.love/.

I wanted to create a way for people to start curating their own list of newsletters and then sharing them with their friends and families. The service helps to generate a private email adddress that they can use to subscribe to newsletters and then start reading those newsletters whenever they want without it getting lost in their email inbox.

So sorry that you're experiencing slowness. I haven't done any performance test on it as for the past few months its mostly been used by just friends and family.

I hope it is faster now.

Tbh, I'm not sure what else to build on top of it as when I built it, I just wanted a safe and private place to be able to curate newsletters without exposing my main email address and allow friends to view my subscriptions.

What do you think feels needs to be touched up? Is it the UI?

https://newsletters.love

If anyone wants to give it a try, please give me your feedback!

https://maskthis.email

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38566463

Points: 3

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34254766

Points: 200

# Comments: 66

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/oscar-saxelby...

I'm curious to hear what's everyone's workflow

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496311

Points: 4

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8549223

Points: 3

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446947

Points: 6

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http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-mh...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7270098

Points: 413

# Comments: 62