this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Any suggestions for a DNS service that specifically allows subzones, also called subdomains and delegation of those subzones.

I’m currently using CloudFlare and NameCheap. It doesn’t look like NameCheap doesn’t support subzones at all, and CloudFlare only supports them at the enterprise level.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Cloudflare supports NS records, which is what you’re looking for. Except it probably only lets you create a zone for the top level domain, so you can only delegate to other providers. AWS Route53 will let you create subdomain zones, and will let you create NS records to set up delegation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

afraid.org does allow almost everyting.

I use their free service to setup my own dns tunnelling endpoint.

[–] czardestructo 6 points 8 months ago

Been using afraid.org for well over 10 years and use dynamic dns to have various subdomains pointing to different IP addresses/hosts I have in physically different places. It just works and I login maybe once every 3-4 years.

[–] Drusenija 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'd second afraid.org, have been using them for years and they've always been great. They also support dynamic DNS so if you're on a dynamic IP address you can have the address be updated automatically when your IP address does.

More relevant to the question, I'm pretty sure you can create NS records for a subdomain as well. I was experimenting once a few years back with a DNS tunnel service and was able to get the DNS side of it configured. Never did get the service itself working but it was more of a curiosity at the time so didn't spend a massive amount of time on it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

what exactly do you mena under subdomains? Any DNS provider will support adding NS entries for subdomains if you want to host you sub-zone somwhere, And any should allow you to use names with "." in it for "fake" subzone, like
a.subzone1 IN A x.x.x.x
a.subzone2 IN A y.y.y.y

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've hosted subdomains on namecheap for 10+ years. It's point and click if you use cpanel or just edit DNS records if you selfhost.

Maybe I'm not reading your question right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah, I use subdomains on namecheap just fine. The support wildcards too; I have an A record for *.sub, so a.sub.domain.com and b.sub.domain.com, etc. all get resolved to the same host.

You can probably create an NS record for sub.domain and have it work. I haven't tried it, but I can type it in namecheap's site and it looks like it'll accept it if I hit submit (i.e. none of the fields have red validation errors).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Route 53 does. I've got a couple there now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

DNS points to the domain. Then you configure the subdomain on the same IP. Maybe I'm missing something, but this is how I understand subdomains.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Decent DNS providers allow you to create NS records for subdomains.
This delegates the subdomain and all of its subdomains to another DNS.

Useful for companies that want to control their own records, but might want to allow a group of developers control over app.example.com and all subdomains, without the developers having to pester the company for record updates.

Also used for acme-dns, which is a self hosted DNS designed to only deal with txt records for acme DNS challenges (ie lets encrypt).
Means you can limit the possible disaster of the DN API keys being leaked (an attacker can only generate TXT records, instead of rewriting all your DNS records)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Do you mean something link subdomain.domain.tld? Because I have that set up with namecheap

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Ive used cloudns for ages. They allow this