I’ve been using Hetzner for some time, but now I want to host everything myself at home.
DNS was easy with Hetzner, just point the domain to Hetzner’s nameservers, and from there to my server.
How are people doing this for home servers? When there’s not access to something like Hetzner’s nameservers.
Is there a free/cheap nameserver I can use to point at my home server’s IP?
Bind9 is the industry standard [citation needed] nameserver. Takes a bit of time to get used to but it’s very powerful. To make a nameserver authoritative for a domain name you would change the NS records with your domain provider, often they have an easy to change option in the web interface, and create a master zone with your desired records for that domain. NS records can only point to IPs though so if you have a dynamic home IP it will be difficult to stay reachable since TLD NS records usually have a long cache time. Some providers may also require you to provide at least 2 nameservers (for redundancy) as that’s what’s in the spec.
Your comment is 100% true. Still I would not advise it, it is not worth the hassle for a home setup IMO.
However, if you have a larger setup and want a strict control of your zones, then bind or powerdns might be suitable.