Hey - lots of good points, thanks. I think I’ll give this a try on a less used domain of mine, just to get a practical feel for it. I do appreciate the arguments against, but to an extent, if both my VPS’s are down, so is basically everything served by the domain. I will have to make sure monitoring is taken care of, and I do have a completely remote email address from all of this.

knot seems to have a current docker image maintained by the project, so I’ll give that one a try and see how it goes. Stay tuned for me coming back crying and repenting in a few day’s time, I guess :)

If worst comes to worst, I can always go back to where I came from, it will have been a learning experience.

It’s super achievable - I’ve run my own DNS for ages, there are a few common pitfalls but overall it’s pretty low maintenance.

• Personally I use PowerDNS, but you could also use something like BIND. I find PDNS to be a little easier to configure
• Make sure you are looking at the docs for PowerDNS Authoritative, not PowerDNS recursor
• You install PDNS Authoritative on bother servers, then designate one as a primary (/master) and the other as a secondary (/slave/replica). You create records on the primary, and configure it to replicate the records to the secondary using AXFR
• I’d recommend using one of the database backends for PDNS - personally I use Postgresql. Sqlite is simpler to set up, but I’ve had issues where making multiple updates over the API causes errors due to locking
• DNSSEC is a bit fiddly to set up initially, but doesn’t add much operational overhead once it’s running
• Take a looks at glue records if your want to host the domain that the nameservers themselves use
• Once you’ve got things running, consider something like https://ns-global.zone as a backup

Feel free to ping me if you have questions or need help getting things set up