Alternatives
Products that do what TheLittleHost – DNS hosting built on my own ASN and Anycast network does
Hey HN, 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…
- 1IB
I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…
2024 · lanparty.house
- 2IB
Hey everyone. It's Sherub here, author of the Build your own DNS Server challenge on CodeCrafters. Currently it’s available in Rust, Go, and Python and is free while in beta. https://codecrafters.io/dns-server I've kept the challenge accessible but still challenging for an intermediate developer. This challenge, like others from CodeCrafters, is self-paced. You can use any tools you prefer (terminal, editor, etc.) to build the project. At the end of the challenge, you will have created a DNS forwarding server. The server can create and read DNS packets and respond to DNS…
2023 · app.codecrafters.io
- 3IG
Hey all, wanted to share my recent weekend hack project. I wanted to improve upon the existing space for looking up information about IP addresses and ASNs. The backend is written in Rust and pulls BGP data every 8 hours from the RIPE RIS project to build up a routing table and also adds geolocation information. The frontend is using React and Tailwind. Would love any feedback or suggestions on what to improve.
2023 · ip.guide
- 4WD
2020 · which.nameserve.rs
- 5KE
My goal was to create a DNS server as simple as the LDAP server I've been contributing to (glauth) and here it is: https://github.com/fusion/kittendns A few things to know about it: - It is easy to configure using a Toml file - I am using it to bail my coredns/etcd instances when under attack - (yes, it also works as a service location server) - It comes with a simple, plain English, rule engine that doesn't do much at this point - It can be used with LetsEncrypt. I use it to retrieve certificates for my home servers. - RFC: all the nice ones :) Anyway, feedback is…
2022
- 6CS
Hi HN, Alexey from Chainstack here. We built Chainstack Self-Hosted to package everything we’ve learned from 8+ years of running blockchain nodes into a single control panel. The goal we’re building this product around is to make blockchain infrastructure boring to operate. The software is free to install. You only pay for the infrastructure you run it on. The quickest way to get hands-on with it is through the Vultr Marketplace or one of the other providers listed in the docs. The current release supports Ethereum Mainnet, Sepolia, and Hoodi with Reth + Prysm full nodes. We’ll be adding…
Jun 2026 · docs.chainstack.com
- 7IB
I built a DNS resolver that lets me use https://frontend.numa instead of localhost:5173 — auto-generated TLS certs, WebSocket passthrough, path routing. No mkcert, no nginx, no /etc/hosts.
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 8KO
2016 · kloudsec.com
- 9AA
Hi HN, I have been messing around with WebRTC for a few years now but when it comes to the TURN server I never quite got to my gold standard of free, self-hosted and open source. I decided to give it a go using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's free tier, meaning that my total spend got down to domain name hosting. I know plenty of people have been burnt by Oracle in the past, but I have had servers running on the free tier for 5 years now without so much as a hiccup. Regardless, the concepts will be the same using any cloud based server. This is the first time I've written up an end-to-end…
2025 · github.com
- 10GB
2014 · dns-api.com
- 11AA
We launched an API for custom hostnames today. A simple HTTP post with a hostname gets a temp hostname with CNAME/a record instructions, as soon as DNS is setup we issue SSL and start accepting traffic for that hostname. It's the quickest way we know of to provision custom hostnames: https://fly.io/mix/custom-hostnames/ When we started building Fly, we figured it was too late to "make SSL easy and the customers will come". Lets Encrypt changed the world, and we knew many companies rolling their own SSL support with nginx, Traefik, etc, etc. It seemed like a…
2017
- 12MF
2021 · github.com
- 13IB
Hey HN, I'm Daniel, solo dev from Germany. I built ClawHosters (https://clawhosters.com), a managed hosting platform for OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework. Quick timeline: domain registered February 5th. First paying customer six days later. I probably should have spent more time on it, but it works. If you haven't seen OpenClaw, it lets you run a personal AI assistant that connects to Telegram, Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp. Self-hosting it is absolutely possible, but it's a pain. You're dealing with Docker setup, SSL certs, port forwarding, security hardening, keeping…
Feb 2026 · clawhosters.com
- 14AS
This is a proof of concept utility which allows you to expose local services to the internet at large: https://github.com/skx/tunneller In short it is a simple ngrok alternative, which you can self-host. Because it is a proof of concept it hasn't been tested extensively, but it seems like it will solve my immediate-needs. Of course it needs test, and structure added. But feedback can't hurt :)
2019
- 15AW
I created this website about a month ago to solve a problem I was facing myself as an aspiring digital nomad. It is very important to find an accommodation with fast and reliable Internet. I also specifically wanted places with Ethernet access to minimize latency as much as possible since I (and many others) use a VPN hosted back at home. The database is in its infancy but covers 11 countries so far. I realize the UX is very basic and a minimum viable product. I intend to have someone help me overhaul the design (with ReactJS perhaps) to make it mobile friendly and more appealing.
2023 · thewirednomad.com
- 16NS
Hey everyone, I was always tired of setting up PowerDNS, Bind and PiHole and I am trying to do more projects in Rust, so here is Nomina. It has: * Split Horizon DNS (return a different IP/record if remote IP is in a certain network etc) * DynDNS Support * Blocklist Integration * DHCP4+6 Server * AXFR/IXFR support * Rewriting of records It can replace most of the common Home Lab setups incl. PiHole AdBlocking etc. https://github.com/DatanoiseTV/Nomina
Jun 2026
- 17IS
2014 · exelion.net
- 18IB
Hi HN, I wanted to give my family, who are scattered all over the world, a simple and private way to connect. The commercial options didn't quite fit, and the open-source tools I found were a bit too barebones and not friendly enough for non-technical users. My main goal was to build something completely self-service. I wanted my family to be able to manage their own devices without my help, so I could set it up once and then stay out of it. This led me to build LeiaGuard, a self-hostable UI for WireGuard built with Next.js. To make it truly easy for everyone, the interface is available in…
2025 · github.com
- 19IB
I've been playing with cross platform windows/linux Kubernetes clusters recently and have had endless problems with installer scripts misconfiguring networking by using the wrong NIC etc. I got frustrated with the tooling on windows to debug container networking so I built a tool that attempts to stitch together the HNS (Host Network Service) & HCS (Host Compute Service) resources into a tree that shows the relationship between configs. You can also search over it to find the networking impacting your containers or launch the windows built in packet capture tool to create a network…
2022 · github.com
- 20OS
Hey Hacker News! I am madnuttah, I am a Windows/Linux Sysadmin and some folks may remember this username for "niche" mods I've made for Fallout and Skyrim and some C# UWP Windows Store Apps which I've retired because of Microsoft's unclear strategy abandoning things from one day to another. Why am I writing this? I wanted to be independent from the DNS servers of my provider, because they have often shined brightly with problems in the past instead of functioning properly, wanted to have a little bit more privacy and freedom back by fighting censorship via DNS, so I built my own Unbound…
2022
- 21AS
Hi HN, I'm the creator of epress. After a lot of work, I'm excited (and a bit nervous) to finally share it with you. For years, I've been feeling like a digital tenant on the platforms I use every day. My content, my social graph, my online identity—they were all stored on someone else's servers, subject to their rules, algorithms, and business models. I could be de-platformed, my data could be sold, or an API I relied on could suddenly be put behind a paywall. I looked into existing decentralized alternatives. While many are great projects, I found they often shifted the trust from a big…
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 22AB
bit.site dynamically captures all requests to *.bit.site, automatically resolving the IPFS/IPNS/Skynet content hashes for the corresponding .bit account records. It returns the relevant static content via HTTPS, enabling users to access decentralized networks with zero configuration on modern browsers. At the same time, we provide global CDN acceleration, striving to enhance the availability of decentralized content.
2023 · bit.site
- 23MR
Hey HN, With the news of OpenRouter possibly being acquired and proliferation of hosted LLM routers (i.e. Ramp Router, Vercel’s AI Gateway), I saw the need for a self hosted solution focused on cost savings, transparency, and performance. So, I built an open sourced router with a simple CLI interface that can easily sit between coding agents and GenAI workloads. For the curious and lazy, at the moment, Millwright has the tools for, - Providers: OpenAI-compatible APIs, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock - Routing: policy-controlled model roles (cheap, mid, frontier), cheapest healthy route selection -…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 24TW
Hey HN! I'm excited to share something I've been working on: a way to set up and launch websites directly through the domain control panel. It allows anyone with a domain name to create, publish, and edit basic websites directly from the domain control panel without any traditional hosting providers or coding knowledge. This narrows the gap for non-technical people looking to publish simple personal and small business websites. This is also the first TWA (triweb application) on the triweb platform (https://triweb.com) we are working on. Triweb currently has limited functionality,…
2024 · banner.triweb.dev
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