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TheLittleHost

DNS hosting built on my own ASN and Anycast network

Details

External ID
47398368
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
—
Website domain
—
Launched
March 16, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
7
Upvotes percentile
0.4108241082410824
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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 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

Enrichment

Theme
proxy, dns, and networking tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Data infrastructure
Audience
B2B
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
dns hosting on private asn and anycast
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Building an authoritative Anycast DNS service requires leasing an ASN, obtaining IP prefixes, setting up BGP routing, and managing physical/virtual network points of presence.

What it would actually take: Building this requires acquiring an Autonomous System Number (ASN) and IP allocations (/24 IPv4 and /48 IPv6) from RIRs like ARIN or RIPE, contracting IP transit and IX peering, and deploying BGP daemons (BIRD/FRR) across globally distributed PoPs. The core DNS engine would run Knot DNS or CoreDNS with robust DDoS mitigation. This requires specialized internet routing and network systems engineering.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 111 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #68 of 112 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 117 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a data infrastructure tool for Media & entertainment yet.