There were days when ZoneEdit would let you host up to five domains completely free of cost. And reasonably so, AFAIK a DNS reply rarely crosses 520 bytes unless you are doing something exotic.<p>ZoneEdit now charges $12 per domain per year. Others seem to have joined the bandwagon. Why so expensive? Most importantly, are there any "full-featured" free providers of repute remaining?
DNS is one of those things that is easy to do yet hard to do right.<p>On the low end someone could run nsd/bind/powerdns on a vm from linode and one from prgmr and be 80% of the way there. That extra 20% involves getting your own IP space for anycast, proper instrumentation, BGP, probably colocation around the world, and making that all work together. If someone is going to go to all that trouble they darn well better be charging for it if you want to be able to depend on it.