deSEC – Free Secure DNS
gurjeet
122 points
42 comments
September 04, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (15 comments)
Stitch4223
We found deSEC to be the only affordable DNS supplier in the EU that complies with state of the art secure DNSSEC. Highly recommended.
cyberax
Does not support AXFR :(
ak4153
Just use unbound
aequitas
Recently migrated to deSEC, great experience so far, except for hitting the API rate limit when using Tofu to plan and apply changes with around a 100 domains. For now I'm using `-parallelism=1` which seems to work.
anonymousiam
Seems legit, but how can I trust them to survive if they're not collecting revenue?
awill
I signed up and saw they only allowed a single subdomain for DDNS, with docs saying to contact support if you needed more. I emailed asking for just 1 more subdomain and support told me that for my usecase I should just use CloudFlare. So I did. No silly miniscule restrictions.
bflesch
After recent US shenanigans why would you spend effort to migrate to yet another Five Eyes controlled service, especially if they do the full "privacy from Germany" circus. What kind of security threat does a migration to such a service actually mitigate? If they were truly a "sovereign EU" kind of project then they'd be on .eu domain, not have security advisors from Virginia, and so on. Nevertheless it's good to see that the decoupling-from-your-allies movement that US citizens have initiated is so scary that they have to set up these kind of fake EU alternatives with some local figureheads.
zetanor
When I last tried deSEC, the service was reliable and well worth the price of admission, but the web UI and API were both quite rough, and propagation tended to be quite slow. It was annoying to do an ACME DNS01 challenge on it, for example. IIRC, the API didn't have a complete set of replace/edit endpoints, so even DNSControl ( https://github.com/DNSControl/dnscontrol ) would leave records nonexistent for a while while during updates. As an aside (though this certainly applies to deSEC) it's strange to me how so many DNS services (free or paid) struggle to import simple Bind zone files, often either giving a vague error ("one or more records could not be imported"), mangling records, or even just silently omitting records. Parsing a zone file has some gotchas, but it doesn't seem like it should be that hard.
iAMkenough
Homepage looks busted on Orion iOS. Signup form has you entering your email address within the yellow “Create Account” button.
8by3
Happy deSec user, use them for all my domains. Had quick thoughtful replies from Peter if I had any questions.
MattTheRealOne
I have been using deSEC for a couple of years without any issues. I mostly just do not want my DNS handled by my registrar so that I can easily transfer domains without worrying about DNS as well, and I do not like how centralized the internet is becoming around Cloudflare.
mhmdfromkarak
do what's best.
lacoolj
Is this somehow related to the other post about another service shutting down its encrypted DNS? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568579 Weird timing?
TheBozzCL
I literally just switched away from Hurricane Electric to deSEC. The only real issue that I had with HE, but it's a big one, is that they don't allow wildcard CNAMEs. I consider that important for the security of some sensitive endpoints that I have no choice but to expose publicly. Those endpoints are well protected with 2FA and heavily monitored, but I wanted to be able to use randomized subdomains to at least have some obfuscation on top.
dmm
I switched to deSEC because they allow you to create tokens for DNS-01 validation which are tightly scoped to a single subdomain. This means I have a VM running "service1.foo.example.com" which is not publicly available but can still get certs from letsencrypt, but with a token that can't be used to issue certs for other domains. It works great!