The future is here, and bright for DNSBuddy.

This project has been something I have honestly been neglecting this past year, and for a lot reasons but not one is because I am no longer interested, quite the opposite. In the last year, I have gotten married, purchased my first house, and relocated across the country, so I have been busy. Since moving, I have been doing a ton of projects around the house, and most of those are near complete. So it's time to shift my focus back onto my side projects, and first up is DNSBuddy.

Before discussing what is changing, let's talk about the origin story and where we are at today. DNSBuddy was launched in 2023, an Open-Sourced, DNS Swiss Army knife is how I liked to phrase it. I built this site, and all the tools, to fix my needs and my problems. Since then we have seen a lot of visitors and uses, as well as some nefarious activity, but I will touch on that in a bit. As of today, we typically see about 4,500 weekly unique visitors, kinda cool if you ask me. We have also serviced over 3.8 million requests. Again, something I am very proud of, and that is why I am revamping this site, and making it a LOT better.

What is changing?

So this is the first iteration, I am launching today, a new fresh coat of paint, a completely revamp of the underlying code, and so much more. Let's dig in.

Moving from NextJS to Golang/Tanstack

Prior to 2.0, we ran a NextJS app, but today we are splitting the backend and frontend up. Something I feel is better for the long term growth of this.

When I was first building out V1 of DNSBuddy, the latest and greatest framework at the time was, NextJS, and don't get more wrong NextJS is still a dominating the eco-system. We have not ran into any issues with scale, or limitations or NextJS it's self. However, I do feel like when I use NextJS I need to use Vercel. I have nothing but love for Vercel team, what they have built is amazing, but I want to move to in a different direction, away from serverless.

So our backend is going to be a Golang service, and our frontend will be leveraging Tanstack. The good thing about this stack is it allows me to easily scale as I need, and leverage whatever hosting platform I see fit. For now, I plan on leveraging either Railway or self-hosting in Hetzner.

Moving from Open Source to Closed Soruce

So, this one might be a saddening for users, but I want to explain the why. Starting with V2, I will be making the repo "closed". The old code will still be alive, and I eventually want to open source V2. However, the underlying code I am building this on, just isn't ready yet. For the last year or so, one of my side projects is a boilerplate, built by me, for me, more on in the future. Since this code isn't open sourced yet, I don't want to open source this code.

Free Tools

So let's chat about these. First off, they are not going anywhere, and instead I plan on adding more, and more around the old ones. One of the long term goals, I would like to start doing is indexing and monitoring DNS changes for a wide set of Domains. This will take time, and at first I will monitor domains that I decide, or ones entered into any of the various tools. When I sat down, and dug into the data behind the ~4m queries, I noticed a ton of overlap. I thought to myself it would be cool to have more data on the previous results or any changes, etc. Let's chat about some of the new tools, as always all our tools will be available here.

Data

As I grow, and start to accumlate more data, I will be publishing either blog posts, or adding more pages dedicated to stuff, I find cool. The first one, is DNS health. This will have a multi-use both for me to easily monitor DNS Status, but also monitor my future underlying servers in a way. In the future, I will start to roll out dedicated DNS Locations. (More on this in the future)