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Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

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Re: Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

#21

Post by zzem »

coretx wrote: post #13
zzem wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main advantage is the ease and speed of use for people who want a simple, business-card-like website or a holding/landing page. The main disadvantage is that due to the UI/UX of domain control panels, managing anything more than a few paragraphs of text gets messy really quickly. But that could be actually an advantage, as the DNS is not particularly well suited to serve large amounts of data, and the app…

Let's be honest here. The main advantage is to make use of someone else his resources. Since it's potentially degrading critical infrastructure and increasing the cost of market entry: Unethical.

Sorry, but I don't understand your point. How is this "degrading critical infrastructure" and "increasing the cost of market entry"? It's also not using someone else's resources - DNS hosting is a web service like any other. You pay for it either as a part of domain registration/renewal cost (when DNS hosting is included in the registrar's offer) or separately (e.g., Route53 or "Advanced DNS" offerings).

Re: Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

#22

Post by zzem »

Kharacternyk wrote: post #17
zzem wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! The time for which TXT records are cached is determined by their TTLs. When publishing a DNS TXT record, you can usually set the TTL to be as low as 1 minute or even less, so any changes to the content would be picked up really quickly. ( https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/ref... )

I know that it's all configurable, what I meant is that some DNS providers may apply a long TTL by default, and it may be desirable to let users of Triweb know about this possible source of confusion.

The DNS name resolution is actually not done by your system or ISP, but by a DNS over HTTPs (DoH) service (Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 resolver). Cloudflare seems to be respecting the TTL as returned by the authoritative name server for your domain, so if you are able to specify a short TTL for a TXT record in your domain control panel, any changes made to the website should be live within that time.

Re: Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

#24

Post by blamecanada »

zzem wrote: post #21
coretx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest here. The main advantage is to make use of someone else his resources. Since it's potentially degrading critical infrastructure and increasing the cost of market entry: Unethical.

Sorry, but I don't understand your point. How is this "degrading critical infrastructure" and "increasing the cost of market entry"? It's also not using someone else's resources - DNS hosting is a web service like any other. You pay for it either as a part of domain registration/renewal cost (when DNS hosting is included in the registrar's offer) or separately (e.g., Route53 or "Advanced DNS" offerings).

What you're not understanding is the way DNS works is the closest DNS server to you (usually your ISP unless you've configured it differently) usually caches the results and then serves those results for subsequent requests.

So you are relying upon the server that is caching those results to serve your data. The intent of DNS TXT records was not to provide you with a content distribution network for free.

Re: Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

#25

Post by plagiat0r »

zzem wrote: post #19
plagiat0r wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me just add one more thing why this idea seems bad to me personally. I'm not atacking you, but the idea. So the way things work today is this, the way I see it: 1. We have a physical layer -> a wire 2. We have a data link layer -> ethernet + ARP or NDP are common here 3. we have a network layer -> currently, two networks are widely used: IPv4 and IPv6 4. We have a transport layer: tcp and udp and quic 7. We have…

Thank you for your insights. I understand the concerns you've raised, but there's also another side to DNS that's often overlooked: its role as a globally available, distributed database for storing small amounts of data linked to domain names. Now, I'm not saying that people should start to host their files on DNS, but for simple, personal "banner" like pages that say "Hi, I'm X, love cats, catch me on @email" that…

Every bit of information that is stored in the DNS is serving one basic purpose: to allow connection to a string. Additions, like CAA or SPF are also consumed by programs to set some limits of a domain usage.

Every other record you mentioned never gained any adoption, simply because this "database" is meant to be used by programs, not humans. Sure, I may use SOA email to contact a DC, but this is exception, not a rule.

Therefore, from the perspective of a person that does DNS courses for technical staff, I conclude that average Joe will never be able to set TXT records properly, and professionals will not do it either because of the reasons I mentioned.

And while I encourage you to pursue your goal, adoption willy be close to none so I'm not so worried about that. Adoption of this will be much lover that adoption of HWINFO or LOC records (ignore RFC 8482, I mean user provided HWINFO data). Your proposal will be used by 50 people total, optimistically.

For all use cases, we have http invented already. Storage for http is also a solved problem.

Re: Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

#26

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

About 16 years ago, I did a different experiment of hosting a website in DNS.

I put small web pages into DNS TXT RRs. Thus, one only needed to make a DNS request over UDP to retrieve the web page, instead of a DNS request and then an HTTP request over TCP. tinydns allows one to put any data into RRs, including control characters. RRs can therefore contain MIME headers. Then I put dnscache in front of it. The result was a highly resilient website with compact pages.

Re: Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

#27

Post by Kharacternyk »

zzem wrote: post #22
Kharacternyk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that it's all configurable, what I meant is that some DNS providers may apply a long TTL by default, and it may be desirable to let users of Triweb know about this possible source of confusion.

The DNS name resolution is actually not done by your system or ISP, but by a DNS over HTTPs (DoH) service (Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 resolver). Cloudflare seems to be respecting the TTL as returned by the authoritative name server for your domain, so if you are able to specify a short TTL for a TXT record in your domain control panel, any changes made to the website should be live within that time.

> so if you are able to specify a short TTL for a TXT record in your domain control panel

Triweb users are able to do that, but they don't necessarily know that they need to do that. For example, the Cloudflare DNS dashboard displays "auto" as a TTL by default, and one has no idea how many seconds "auto" is for a TXT record.

Re: Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS

#28

Post by coretx »

zzem wrote: post #21
coretx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest here. The main advantage is to make use of someone else his resources. Since it's potentially degrading critical infrastructure and increasing the cost of market entry: Unethical.

Sorry, but I don't understand your point. How is this "degrading critical infrastructure" and "increasing the cost of market entry"? It's also not using someone else's resources - DNS hosting is a web service like any other. You pay for it either as a part of domain registration/renewal cost (when DNS hosting is included in the registrar's offer) or separately (e.g., Route53 or "Advanced DNS" offerings).

DNS is a Domain Name Service. Not a webservice.
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