History of DuckDNS

Hi Patreon's,

We have joined patreon.com with the goal to get support from our users to help cover the operational costs of running our Free Dynamic DNS service. 

We are 2 Software Engineers who have worked in various internet technologies for UK ISP's over the last 15 years, DuckDNS is our hobby.

We have run this service for over 3 years with sporadic donations via multiple means, we created the service with the promise that this service will always be free for anyone, as simple as possible to use and operate as efficiently as possible (to keep costs low).

This service allows people to run pet projects, and internet based services on connections without fixed IP addresses, this allow many hobbyists, charities & low income enthusiasts to run their services such as:

• Web Servers
• Email Servers
• Web Cams
• Media Servers
• Weather Stations
• Minecraft Servers
• TeamSpeak Servers
• IRC Nodes
• Own Cloud
• Personal VPN's

Many Dynamic DNS services have advertising, require regular website logins, sell personal details, restrict domains/usage. Our aim is to provide the best possible user experience in maintaining privacy, integrity and security.

Our service started life as one of these hobbyist projects to support another project, Raspberry Pi SSH Gateway on a Dynamic IP. We quickly realised that a user friendly DDNS service that had a simple open API would be very useful for many other hobbyists.

As the service is free its popularity grew surprisingly quickly as did the load, a lot of our early development was centred on efficiency and performance. More recently we have reserved more AWS servers to help handle the traffic and keep the service fast and resilient.

3 Years in; we now have over 150,000 users creating 1Tb of traffic via 5 billion requests each month. At times we are dealing with 1,000 request per second into our cluster.

This level of usage has a relational cost, mostly around request traffic, as this software is extremely efficient and requires little CPU/RAM. The costs however are growing in a steady linear fashion as we become more popular.

Latest Update

This week we have implemented IPv6 AAAA record handling for all users. Recent improvements have significantly reduced server load which has improved Site & DNS performance.

As well as ironing out a few bug reported by users we have also written a specification page  that outlines the service API.

Users can now clear their records independently and also update A & AAAA records at the same time.

QUACK!