Hurricane Electric has a pretty solid free DNS offering. I've been using it for like 10 years.

https://dns.he.net/

I haven't needed to talk to them much, but one time I tried to add a .ninja domain, and there backend wouldn't handle it. I emailed them to report the problem at 4:49 p.m. I got an email at 7:09 p.m. the same day (2 hours 20 minutes later later) asking me to try adding it again. [1] When a free service fixes your problem in a few hours, they get +1 gold star from me.

[1] I just checked my email to look up the actual times. This was on Mar 15, 2017.

Also, HE DNS will "secondary" from your own server.

For example, you can run your own DNS server on a VPS or something, and HE will AXFR the zones from your VPS and serve them authoritatively.

This allows you to run a hidden master, for example, which I can imagine some HN folks being interested in.

Doing exactly this with HE. Running Knot DNS [1] on Digital Ocean.

[1]: https://www.knot-dns.cz/

I don't know what you just said, but it sounds awesome. I bookmarked this comment to review the next time I mess with DNS :)

+1 for Hurricane Electric. Right now I'm giving CloudFlare's DNS a try, but HE gave me solid service (including dynamic DNS) for years.

Dnsimple is a registrar as well. I have my personal domains there.

I’ve been using iwantmyname for many, many years and have been super satisfied with them.

Porkbun is the cheapest I've seen

Thanks. In light of what just happened I've decided to spend around 1.5 - 3 times as much on DNS & registration