LonelyDNS LonelyDNS
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Our Story

LonelyDNS started its journey as a side project in 2018 after the domains for several customers hosted on AWS Route 53 stopped resolving. The reason was the infamous BGP hijacking of Amazon’s Route 53 DNS Service but this event led me to create a basic DNS monitoring webapp using Django with a Celery task queue.

The Beginnings

This very simple CRUD webapp kicked off a task every 5 minutes that resolved a domain’s nameserver (NS), mail server (MX), and “www” CNAME records. If the records had changed since last lookup, an email documenting the changes was sent.

The app went through a few iterations based on the languages and platforms I was attempting to stay current in:

Migration to Elixir

In 2021 I virtually attended my second ElixirConf and somewhere between Chris McCord’s Future of Full-stack, Mark Ericksen’s Globally Distributed Elixir Apps on Fly.io and Parker Selbert’s Testing Oban Jobs From the Inside Out, something clicked:

I was making this way more complicated than it needed to be.

I used this ephiphany as an excuse to learn Elixir and rewrite LonelyDNS using the Phoenix Framework and Oban. The deployment to Fly.io ended up being a no-brainer.

Future Plans

LonelyDNS is currently 100% self-funded and independent thanks to an architecture that keeps costs low and customers who subscribe to one of our DNS monitoring plans. The app will continue to evolve as I add new features and improve my Elixir skills.

Contact Me

You can contact me at hello@lonelydns.com.