I have a pair of DO droplets doing nothing but primary/secondary chroot-bind. I have DDNS setup so my PFSense router updates the zone with the current IP address of my home setup and I handle all the DNS tasks (spf/dkim/dmarc/blah blah blah) there. I wrote a couple of scripts to handle zone signing and all that jazz so I don't have to log in often, if ever.
I'll be replacing those with a modern os shortly, and probably adding recursion to them so I can use them to resolve personal DNS requests for all the machines on my domain (external and internal hosts).
Fuck man, I consider myself relatively knowledgeable with this stuff and desperately want to get into self hosting more stuff, especially stuff like DNS. and your comment just shows me how much of an uphill battle I have ahead of me.
My old gaming PC running truenas core and a few jails make me seem like a wizard to my family and stuff but I'm just a hecking n00b that's good at following instructions.
Where's the guide for establishing a whole alternative Internet presence outside of the current reign of control?
Lol I'm proud of being the same species as you guys and glad there are people out there willing to share
DNS is complicated and takes some time to really absorb. Places like Cloudflare make things very straight forward. It's beat to think about what you want to accomplish, then start looking for guides on each of the individual pieces (authoritative server, master/slave replication, recursion, DNS over tls, dnssec, etc). Take it in baby steps and WRITE NOTES. The now taking will help you absorb the details and will leave you a paper trail of things when you get something running and then have to go deal with other life, then come back to it in a few months.
I was in your shoes a few months ago when I decided to look into spreading my hosting needs around after using a hand-holding all-in-one provider for a decade. DNS is not that hard, and learning about it will be very good in this hobby.
Also, a good service provider will help you with most of the complexity, for example an email provider with all the MX and anti-spam records you need, you just need to import them into the DNS.