deSEC: Free, Secure DNS Hosting with Built-in DNSSEC
deSEC – Free Secure DNS
deSEC is a free DNS hosting service that prioritizes security and privacy. It automatically signs all DNS records with DNSSEC using modern elliptic-curve cryptography, supports advanced record types like HTTPS/SVCB and TLSA, and offers a REST API, Terraform provider, and language bindings for automation. With global Anycast networks, IPv6 support, and fast updates, it's suitable for individuals and web hosters alike. deSEC is open-source, non-profit (based in Berlin), and backed by ICANN and NLnet.
We think we have the coolest GUI on the market.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.