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.
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