Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Cloudflare doesn't allow me to change my name servers? What blasphemy! I had never considered this, I thought it would be allowed by default. Where can I read about this?
I'm looking for a cheap domain registrar with terraform support
It's the main reason why their domains are so cheap. Their thinking is that since you have to use Cloudflare services to use the domain, you may look at the paid services and decide to pay for one, or suggest it at your workplace.
They charge wholesale price for domains, so they make $0 profit on them. Effectively it's a loss leader to hook you into the ecosystem. That's the same reason why VMware ESXi used to be free for home labs - users would become advocates for it and use it professionally.
I'll paste the comment I made earlier:
Which registrar do you suggest with good API support? Most of my infrastructure uses Terraform and Salt
I use Porkbun for most of my domains. They appear to have an API but I've never tried it: https://porkbun.com/api/json/v3/documentation#DNS%20Create%20Record
I'm not familiar with Terraform or Salt but maybe you could try use something like https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol as an abstraction over the DNS provider.
Salt is an alternative to Ansible. However I prefer HashiCorp's Terraform for day 0 deployments. Unfortunately, PorkBun doesn't seem to support Terraform, so I'll keep looking. I'll take a look at the link you sent, thanks.
Out of curiosity, if you don't use these IaC tools, how do you manage self-hosted infrastructure?
Manually, mostly.
DNS is handled by my own PowerDNS server using the PowerDNS-Admin web UI. I manually add records as needed. Editing a domain sends AXFRs / IXFRs to the secondary DNS hosts I use (I self-host three PowerDNS servers, plus I have a DNSMadeEasy account for the important domains, although I'll be dropping that at some point since they increased prices over 10x after being acquired by DigiCert. I use acme-dns for Let's Encrypt DNS challenges. I take daily backups of everything, including the PowerDNS database, so restoring the DB after a server failure is not an issue.
I have 28 VPSes for dnstools.ws and those are lightly managed using Ansible (there's really not a lot running on them): https://github.com/Daniel15/dnstools/blob/master/ansible/roles/dnstools-worker/tasks/main.yml, but I do configure the base OS manually. I don't set up new ones often so this has been fine.
I have a few other VPSes (all running Debian) and a home server (running Unraid) that I handle manually. I don't change things often so it mostly hasn't been an issue for me. Stuff just keeps working. I take daily backups.
The Debian systems all have
unattended-upgradesinstalled. The 'main' Debian VPS I've got started as a dedicated server running Debian Sarge (3.1, from 2005) and I've just kept upgrading it over the years. These days it's a VPS that's much cheaper yet way more powerful than the original 2005 dedicated server :)