Yes.
zonefile-synczonefile-loadNSD is simpler. For a two-node setup, simpler wins.
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CS student budget: I have the free tier Oracle Cloud ARM instance. 4GB RAM, not 256MB, but the principle matters.
Running Knot because I'm learning DNSSEC. The automatic signing and ZSK rollover are educational. I would not trust my config in production—I'm sure I've got NSEC3 opt-out wrong somewhere.
Oracle free tier is not "free," it's "free until Larry decides." I would not build learning habits on a platform that can evaporate your account for looking at it wrong.
Run your experiments on something you pay for. Contabo's 4 EUR is a coffee.
Counterpoint: my Oracle instance has run 18 months without issue. The ARM performance is good, the egress is generous. I use it as my tertiary NS.
Primary: Knot on Contabo DE. Secondary: NSD on Hetzner FI. Tertiary: Knot on Oracle US-West. Diverse providers, diverse countries, one catalog zone.
This thread drifted hard from "NSD vs Knot on 256MB" to "global anycast secondary architecture." Both are useful.
For the original question: if you're actually on 256MB, NSD. If you have 512MB or more, Knot's operational features justify the RAM. The breakpoint is real.
I migrated from NSD to Knot last month. Same 1GB Hetzner VM. The RAM difference was irrelevant but the catalog zone eliminated my Ansible playbook for zone distribution.
One
knotc zone-statusWorth it.
Following. Currently on NSD with three zones, manual rsync. Considering Knot for the catalog but worried about migration complexity.
Is there a zone file format difference? Can I just copy my NSD zone files to Knot?
Standard zone file format, yes. The gotcha is $GENERATE directives—Knot handles some but not all NSD extensions. Also NSD's
zonefilefileI migrated 40 zones in an afternoon. Most worked unchanged. Three needed $GENERATE expansion.
This thread has convinced me to stay on Cloudflare free for my one domain. The complexity-to-value ratio of self-hosting is absurd unless you have many zones or specific compliance needs.
This. Learning is valid. Pretending your Contabo VM beats anycast is not.
Nobody claimed that. The claim is that "beats anycast" is not the only metric. Control, privacy, learning, compliance—there are reasons beyond latency.
My employer requires EU data residency for DNS queries. Cloudflare's EU nodes are... present, but where does the logging go? We self-host in Frankfurt for this reason.