My Story with HiDNS

Source: Dev.to

Origin and Motivation

HiDNS was not a project that was carefully “designed” from the very beginning. Instead, it was a path I gradually found myself on, pushed forward by real problems I kept encountering along the way.

At first, I was simply running a small Telegram community for technical discussions. I noticed that many people in the group felt frustrated because they couldn’t get a usable free domain. At the same time, with many existing public suffixes, short and memorable prefixes had already been taken. That was when I started to ask myself: could I try to build a more friendly public suffix on my own? That question eventually led to the birth of HiDNS.

Naming

HiDNS comes from “Hello DNS.” The “Hi” is not a complicated technical acronym, but a simple greeting — saying hello to DNS, to developers, and to the internet itself. I started with hidns.co, and later added hidns.vip and hidns.cc. These were never about expansion for its own sake, but about leaving room for compliance, sustainability, and long‑term operation.

Core Challenge: Abuse

From day one, I was very clear about one thing: the biggest challenge of running a public suffix is not technology, but abuse. Spam, phishing sites, malicious redirects, false positives from security vendors — these issues show up almost every day. Often, people only see a domain being flagged, without realizing that behind the scenes there are emails to write, explanations to provide, evidence to collect, and long back‑and‑forth conversations with different security companies.

Registration Process

That’s why registering a HiDNS domain has never been as simple as “click and get it.” Invitation codes, intended‑use descriptions, support tickets, and, when necessary, temporary suspension of DNS resolution are not meant to create artificial barriers. They are an attempt to replace uncontrolled growth with a chain of trust. I strongly believe that a resource treated with care is far more likely to be used responsibly.

Growth, Funding, and Metrics

This has not been an easy path. HiDNS has no venture capital, no commercial team, and for a long time, no obvious “metrics” to point to. Our Public Suffix List pull requests have been rejected more than once, for a very practical reason: not enough users yet. Still, I’m not discouraged. The real value of HiDNS lies in the genuine blogs, projects, and personal websites that already exist because of it.

Future Outlook

Even today, HiDNS continues to move forward slowly and cautiously. It does not aim to become the largest free subdomain platform. It simply wants to offer another reliable option for users who truly need one. Hopefully, years from now, when someone looks back, they’ll see that there was an honest attempt to keep something — that is very easy to abuse — as clean and responsible as possible.

Philosophy

To me, HiDNS is neither a “product” nor a “brand.” It is a long‑term responsibility. It represents not only domain names and DNS records, but also my commitment to internet order, technical restraint, and the principle of “don’t cause unnecessary trouble for others.”

I also hope that everyone who uses HiDNS will treat it with care. Together, let’s maintain a healthy, reliable, and sustainable HiDNS community.