I've tested just about every DNS provider I could find. Self-hosting and Bunny aside, my needs are especially well met by CloudDNS and LuaDNS.

https://www.cloudns.net/premium/

https://www.luadns.com/pricing.html

I've found every other offering to be lacking. Some examples: Cloudflare is alright but has settings footguns if you're not used to Their Way of Doing It™ (e.g., before using DNSControl, I had to manually flip switches to turn off proxying every time I updated my zones). deSEC is free and okay, but sometimes quite slow to propagate and its UI+API are unwieldy. DNS Made Easy is often pushed on social media, but it's ridiculously pricey for what you get if you don't need a SLA. DNSimple seemed nice but IIRC I couldn't get a different API token per zone (?).

I'm currently relying mainly on LuaDNS. For me, it functions as a "dumb" DNS host (i.e., not using their Lua configuration-as-code system). Their API is oddly designed, but it's been passable since a recent-ish update, which has allowed me to safely port my zone files to DNSControl.

https://dnscontrol.org

I think you're right about dnsimple tokens unless they've changed recently. I ended up writing a proxy that held the powerful token and then issued its own tokens to get around that... A bit convoluted

Annoying for dynamic DNS and DNS ACME challenges where you want a server to manage its own records and nothing else

I've put a comment on the parent thread, but unless I've misunderstood what the poster said, we addressed the limitation back in 2023 with scoped access tokens.

> DNSimple seemed nice but IIRC I couldn't get a different API token per zone (?).

We overhauled our account tokens a few years back: https://blog.dnsimple.com/2023/11/scoped-access-tokens/ . With account tokens you can specify fine-grained scoped access control, including specifying only one or more zones that a token has read or read/write access to.

I should add a friend has recommended DNsimple.com and I’ve previously found their service to be excellent.

https://dnsimple.com/

50 cents per domain per month 10 cents per million queries

That’s prob cheap enough to support lots of little hobby sites and bigger traffic sites likely have some budget.

I used them in the past (many years ago) and was very surprised when my DNS was affected by a cloudflare outage. Turns out (back then) they relied on the cf network for DoS protection against their resolvers[1]. I was surprised to learn that and honestly thought that if I already take a dependency on cloudflare I might as well have them host my zones directly for free.

[1] Not completely sure but I think this was the incident https://blog.dnsimple.com/2020/07/incident-dns-resolution/

At one point we were using Cloudflare's DNS Firewall product for our entire edge network. We have since moved half of our edge network to our own infrastructure and are currently in the process of expanding our edge network further, so at this point an outage at Cloudflare should be at least partially mitigated for our customers due to our separate edge network, and eventually it should be completely independent.

Second DNSimple. Cheap to start and lots of nice features/support if you grow e.g. terraform provider, an acme.sh plugin, Okta support etc.

Thanks for recommending us, I (and the rest of the team) appreciate it.

I make a point of using a dedicated service provider for each distinct service. YMMV but I'm happy with DNSMadeEasy (DNS), IWantMyName (registrar) and Fastmail (email).

Try desec.io, I use them and am very happy. Free DNSSEC, which some other DNS hosters want to charge you for (IONOS, looking at you).

You can use Bunny for DNS-only, it works well