I'm James, a MSC cybersecurity student from the UK with a habit of learning things by building them. DNS Daddy started because I wanted to understand protective DNS properly — not just read about it.
I was also increasingly frustrated by how quickly useful cybersecurity tools can become expensive, complicated or inaccessible to smaller organisations. Enterprise products from companies like Cisco can be incredibly capable, but smaller businesses don't always have enterprise budgets, dedicated security teams or the time to navigate complex licensing and implementation.
So I wondered:
Could I build something simpler, open source and accessible?
That's how DNS Daddy started.
It's a free, self-hosted protective DNS project that I'm developing publicly on GitHub. There are no subscriptions, paid tiers, free trials, feature paywalls or licence fees. And I want to be completely transparent about how it's being built.
A significant amount of DNS Daddy has been created through AI-assisted, "vibe-coded" development while I learn cybersecurity and software engineering more deeply.
That means it's experimental.
There will be questionable decisions. There will be bugs. There may be security issues I haven't found yet.
I'm not pretending otherwise.
In fact, that's one of the main reasons I've made the project open source.
I want people who know more than me — security engineers, developers, network engineers, sysadmins, students and curious tinkerers — to look at the code, question decisions, break things in their own labs and help make it better.
If you look at something I've written and think:
"Why on earth did he do it that way?"
Please tell me.
Open an issue. Submit a pull request. Suggest a safer approach. Teach me something.
My goal isn't to pretend I've single-handedly built the next enterprise security platform.
It's to learn by building something real, share that learning openly, build a community around the project and explore whether useful defensive security tooling can be made more accessible.
If DNS Daddy eventually helps someone learn something, protects a network or becomes genuinely useful because a community helped improve it, then the experiment has worked.
DNS Daddy is free. Keep it that way.
You don't need to pay anything to use DNS Daddy.
If you'd like to support the hosting, infrastructure, testing and caffeine that goes into developing it, you're welcome to buy me a coffee.
But contributing code, finding a bug, improving the documentation or simply sharing the project is every bit as valuable.
Built for education. Built in public. Hopefully built into something that makes the internet a little safer.
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