1Gbps down/700Mbps up here, 35€/month (another french provider), no data caps - for 5 bucks/month more I could have 5Gbps down/1Gbps up, but… well, my home network is still using 1Gbps switches - but all the cabling was built with 10Gbps in mind.
Data caps are pure robbery. We run a non-profit ISP/hosting platform and a non-profit IXP with friends in West France, the only thing you pay (and the only thing end users should have to pay) is goddamn bandwidth.
Kudos for mentionning powerDNS, it’s an amazing software :)
One thing I love with powerDNS is the various backends available, notably the postgreSQL and mariaDB/mysql ones. Only the primary powerdns instance modifies the database records, the secondary instances just read from database (master or replicas). Thus, no real need for AXFR: as soon as you added/modified a record on the primary, the secondary pdns servers will see it in the database.
The pdnsutil CLI tool is also really convenient, and the powerDNS API is a godsend when you need to automatise stuff for thousands of domains and hundred of thousands of records. There’s also a nice third-party webUI (powerdns-admin, docker image: pdnsadmin/pda-legacy). Bonus, Terraform does have a powerdns provider.
At work we use dnsdist (from powerDNS too) to load-balance between our powerdns instances (with caching!), and to filter out/rate-limit/temporary ban bad actors (dns laundering, records enumeration and such for example).
Physical machines get stars names: Vega, Arcturus, Polaris, Fomalhaut, Deneb, Antares, Procyon, Algol, Aldebaran… and so on.
Virtual machines naming scheme is more reasonable: [os]-[role][number if needed]. Examples:
It’s possible to write very complex rules/ACLs with HAproxy… stick-tables, ACLs with regexes on whatever HTTP header, source or destination ACLs, map files, geoblocking, lua scripting, load-balancing from round-robin to host header load balancing, dynamic backend servers provisionning through DNS… Not that you can’t do it with Nginx (it started as a reverse-proxy before becoming a jack of all trades), nor that nginx isn’t a great tool (it is!), but HAProxy can do very complex things too. It also follows the good ol’ UNIX philosophy of “one program to do one thing and do it well” and thus doesn’t try to be a webserver, hence why you need a webserver behind it to serve anything from static files to PHP/Python/whatever.