Following the short-lived downtime of Cloudflare in December, I replied to Domi on Mastodon, asking for a beta code for SERVFAIL, an authoritative nameserver network. I won't tell you what SERVFAIL is, because there's a much nicer website where you can read that: beta.servfail.network
I had wanted to not use Cloudflare for a while, mainly because I do not like monopolies. And I particularly do not like companies of which a failure means half the internet stops working.
So, beta key in hand, I created an account and enthusiastically reached the "delegate your domain to Servfail". And then was immediately reminded why I dislike monopolies: CF does not let you replace the nameservers of domains bought there, so now I need to find another registrar to transfer to, and this is delaying me swapping to Servfail, and I am very annoyed.
Anyways, after getting over my frustration, I went through the domain transfer process from Cloudflare to Porkbun, which offers equally cheap renewal fees. The last thing to do on this end was just to swap the nameservers to SERVFAIL's.
Thankfully, the update took less than an hour and I was able to add my domain to SERVFAIL. Then it was just a matter of adding my DNS records, which went smoothly, even for my mail server at PurelyMail. I will say that my heart melted when I saw the DDNS option which is as simple as a GET request to SERVFAIL (with a token), and it automagically sets the A record with the public IP of the sender. A minor thing is that, with the simplicity of SERVFAIL, the dashboard loads sooooo much faster than Cloudflare where I have time to make a cup of coffee.
And that's pretty much it, all my sites are working fine. I am very impressed, SERVFAIL is very cool and I love it so much more than Cloudflare. I am particularly appreciative of the server in South Africa which is very close to home.
Edit a couple hours later: darn, software made by humans for humans is insane. Why am I getting emotional from DNS?
