GreenlightedNS is DNS software for IT administrators and self-hosters who want to improve the reliability and performance of their applications without relying on large public cloud providers.

Create load-balanced DNS names backed by HTTP, TCP, and ICMP health checks. Get full support for IPv6 and DNSSEC.

You can start immediately using our hosted service. Or host it yourself on your own infrastructure.

GreenlightedNS is entering beta now. If this is of interest to you, please consider signing up.

How It Works

Functionally

GreenlightedNS is a DNS-based load balancer, meaning that it uses DNS records to route clients to severs.

Like in traditional DNS, a service has a name (e.g. www.example.com) with records that point to one or more servers.

Unlike traditional DNS, GreenlightedNS can dynamically add or remove records based on healthchecks, geographical proximity, and more. For example, it can remove a server's A record/IP address from www.example.com when that server goes down.

Operationally

GreenlightedNS is a service that runs in tandem with PowerDNS.

  • PowerDNS serves DNS records to clients (i.e. to end-users of your service)
  • GreenlightedNS performs healthchecks and updates PowerDNS with the records that it should serve to clients

If you use our hosted GreenlightedNS service, you can get started right away with creating your own load-balanced DNS names.

If you self-host, you are responsible for running both GreenlightedNS and PowerDNS.

Use-Case

Send users to closest server

GreenlightedNS is aware of your client's IP address, and can direct you to the server that's closest to you.

Maybe you're an ambitious self-hoster who wants to host your static webpage from both your home server and a Raspberry Pi at your friend's house. With GreenlightedNS, you can direct your website's users to whichever server is nearest them.

Or maybe you're an IT admin who supports VPN servers at multiple regional offices. You want your users to connect to whichever VPN server is closest to them in order to ensure the lowest overall latency for your users.

Use-Case

High-availability failover

If you want to host a highly-available website without using some third party like Cloudflare, GreenlightedNS will allow you to healthcheck your primary server and automatically send clients to a secondary server if that fails.

Not only can you use that automated healthchecking, but it's easy to override the system at any time, putting you firmly in control.