After almost three years of service, I’ve decided to deprecate HNSDNS. This is due to the following reasons:
- I am migrating the servers to a different ISP, and that would mean that I would need to change the well-established IP addresses that the project currently uses.
- The service is costing me too much money, considering the fact that I need to pay for additional IPv4 addresses and multiple servers to keep it running.
- The software that the service currently uses, especially on the DNS resolver part, is not stable enough for this usecase. There has been many downtimes without an apparent reason, and I don’t have the time and resources to monitor it 24/7.
- There have been many long-lasting DDoS attacks to the service, that pushed the server’s CPU to 100% almost constantly. Even though the server’s ISP allows this usage, it is something that I needed to solve everytime, and the only solution that worked was to block an entire country (Brazil), which is far from being ideal.
- I’ve been away from the Handshake community for more than 2 years. Even though I still maintain my domains and wallets, I have put little effort into them, and I want to focus on other services that I’m currently offering and developing.
- Some alternatives to the service have arisen, and others (such as HDNS.io) have been fixed and offer a comparable experience to the one you may get with HNSDNS.
But this is not the end of HNSDNS as a project. Handshake community member and founder of the Lume Web project pcfreak30/ is willing to take over the project. HNSDNS’s assets will be transferred to him during August, except for the domain name which will be transferred on September 4th. On August 18th, HNSDNS’s DNS resolver will stop resolving domains, redirecting instead to a website stating the deprecation of the service. HNSDNS’s nameservers will continue to operate as usual until September 4th, which will then be fully shut down. The DNS resolvers will also fully stop working on that day.
I know that this is a sad decision, but I am excited for what HNSDNS will be in the future under the stewardship of pcfreak30/.
If you have any doubts or questions, please get in touch with me.
Important note: pcfreak30/ has mentioned that he will not immediately continue the project, and it will stop working for a while until he is able to resume it. Also, the availability of certain functions may differ from the existing ones, at pcfreak30/’s own discretion.