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.
- Millwright · hn · 2026-07-22 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Chainstack Self-Hosted, hosting your own blockchain nodes made simple · hn · 2026-06-21 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Open database tracking 77K public DNS servers every 10 minutes · hn · 2025-12-18 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Nomina · hn · 2026-06-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust · hn · 2026-04-02 · 115 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Browse Internet Infrastructure · hn · 2026-02-09 · 110 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Posthorn, self-hosted mail gateway · hn · 2026-05-27 · 83 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I built an ISP infrastructure emulator from scratch with a custom vBNG · hn · 2026-03-11 · 68 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a data infrastructure tool for Media & entertainment yet.