GratisDNS.dk – 135 Customer Reviews: Analysis (Aug 2026)

Features and Services

GratisDNS was built around one idea: free DNS hosting for anyone, whether or not you bought anything else. DNS (Domain Name System) is the phone book that turns a domain name into a server address. Letting people run that for free, on any domain, made GratisDNS a default choice for Danish technical users for twenty years.

What Is Left at gratisdns.dk Today

We checked on 18 August 2026. Both gratisdns.dk and www.gratisdns.dk return a 301 redirect (a permanent “moved” instruction) to www.one.com/da/. The gratisdns.dk nameservers, the machines that answer DNS queries for a domain, are ns01.one.com and ns02.one.com. Its mail records point at one.com mail servers in Copenhagen. The public WHOIS record, which lists who a domain is registered through, names ONE.COM A/S as registrar.

So the domain is alive and owned. The service behind it is not. There’s no login, no price list, no support desk, no product page.

The archive dates the switch-off. The Internet Archive’s last successful capture of the GratisDNS control panel at ssl.gratisdns.dk is 30 June 2022. Its companion site at web.gratisdns.dk was already returning a redirect by 2 July 2022. So the machinery ran on for about three months after customers were migrated, then stopped.

What GratisDNS Used to Offer

• Free DNS hosting for any domain, regardless of where it was registered
• Domain registration across .dk and a long list of foreign extensions
• Mail hosting and spam filtering, sold as separate add-ons
• Web hosting, marketed in Danish as a “webhotel”
• SSL certificates resold from several certificate authorities

The free tier carried the brand, and everything else was the business model. Larsen Data, the company behind it, made its money on the paid extras people bought once the DNS had them.

Scale and Data Centre Locations

All of it ran on the company’s own nameservers in Denmark. Danish Wikipedia, citing DK Hostmaster registry statistics, records it as the nameserver for 144,705 of 1,050,140 .dk domains on 19 February 2010. That’s about 14% of the entire Danish namespace, which is why its closure got national tech press coverage rather than a shrug.

Those domains, the ones that stayed put, now resolve from one.com’s infrastructure instead. If you want current Danish options, our Denmark web hosting guide covers the providers that are still selling.

Performance Expectations

No current benchmark data exists, because there’s nothing left to benchmark. Historical customer reports were unusually consistent on this point. Reviewers describing five, ten and twenty years of use said they had never seen the nameservers go down. One 2012 reviewer pushed back and claimed 80% to 99% uptime. They were the outlier in a corpus that otherwise treated reliability as the service’s one uncontested strength.

Customer Experience

Its review profile holds 131 reviews and scores 3.2 out of 5. The scores cluster at both ends: 57 five-star (43.5%), 22 four-star (16.8%), 6 three-star (4.6%), 7 two-star (5.3%) and 39 one-star (29.8%). Almost nobody found it merely acceptable. People either kept it for fifteen years or wanted it prosecuted.

We scanned 129 of those reviews individually and grouped them by year. Reviews from 2007 to 2012 average 4.04 stars across 57 reviews. Reviews from 2013 to 2022 average 2.90 across 72. The service didn’t get worse at DNS. It got worse at dealing with people, and the corpus records exactly when.

Look at the newest review and the story finishes itself. It’s dated 1 February 2022, the same day customers received the closure email. Nothing has been posted in the four and a half years since. The profile is unclaimed and no longer collecting.

What Customers Praised

Longevity, over and over. A March 2019 reviewer described twenty years of use with nothing going wrong. Two 2021 reviewers show the same pattern: one counting eleven years since 2010, another managing about thirty domains across several accounts. The final review, from February 2022, opens “Jeg har haft GratisDNS siden 2001”. Its author never once had to contact support, because the thing always worked.

Independence was the second theme, and it’s the technical reason the service mattered. Because DNS sat with GratisDNS rather than with a web host, customers could change hosting provider by editing one record. One 2017 reviewer put it plainly: they could switch webhotel without redelegating the domain.

Price came third. Cheap domain registration across an unusual number of extensions, with the DNS thrown in for nothing.

Common Complaints

Support was gated behind money, and that generated the angriest reviews in the set. A November 2014 reviewer reported DKK 200 charged per support session. Reviewers in February 2019 and March 2021 both described DKK 800 demanded to change a contact email or restore account access. The word several of them reached for was “løsesum”, Danish for ransom.

Getting a domain out was the second recurring problem. Reviews from 2011, 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2020 describe transfers that stalled, release codes that never arrived, or accounts blocked over a disputed invoice. One January 2020 reviewer had acquired assets from a bankruptcy estate and held the trustee’s written confirmation. They still could not get access.

Invoicing came third. An October 2020 reviewer described reminders arriving two months before the due date, then every fourteen days until payment. Others reported renewals they hadn’t ordered, and collections threats over disputed amounts. A June 2021 review flagged a term requiring cancellation at least 30 days before renewal. That caught people who assumed an unused domain would simply lapse.

Tone runs through all of it. “Arrogant” appears in the actual review titles for 2012, 2015, 2016, 2020 and 2021, and inside the text of several more. Support ran mainly through a public forum, and reviewers described being answered sarcastically in front of an audience.

Community Feedback (Reddit and Forums)

Danish community discussion documents the closure best, because the affected users were technical and they wrote it down.

A large r/Denmark reaction thread went up in the first days of February 2022, when the emails landed. One commenter got the mail the day before, asked support whether their three domains would stay free, and was told no. A blogger at r00t.dk posted the same finding on 1 February 2022 after the same conversation. Two people, two channels, one answer: the free tier did not survive for anyone with more than a single domain.

Notice, not price, was the dominant complaint. “Det er sygt dårlig stil med så kort varsel”, wrote one commenter: terribly poor form at such short notice. Customers of fifteen and twenty years got roughly a month.

Where did they go? Overwhelmingly Cloudflare, named in nearly every thread as free authoritative DNS with no domain limit. Simply.com was the most common Danish choice. Hurricane Electric came up as free DNS for up to 50 domains. Hetzner, Namecheap, joker.com, Gandi, Azure DNS and DigitalOcean each picked up a few. By a February 2023 thread the tone had settled into resignation. One user said their domains were still at one.com “af ren dovenskab”, out of pure laziness, and they’d rather be anywhere else.

One migration report is worth singling out. A Danish developer wrote on 28 August 2022 that one.com had moved their domain across automatically, apparently matched on a shared email address. one.com then added an MX mail record, added a www record, and put a one.com advertising page on the www address. The developer only ever had a domain there and ran their site on AWS. Their words: it makes them nervous that a provider would change a DNS setup that way.

Support Quality

There is no GratisDNS support. Historically it was a public forum, with paid email and phone escalation, and the reviews split hard on whether that was fair. Defenders argued you can’t demand hand-holding on a free product. Critics pointed out the fees applied to paying domain customers too. Both were right, which is roughly how a 3.2 average happens.

When to Use GratisDNS

In 2026 there is no scenario in which you should try to buy from GratisDNS, because there’s nothing to buy. Two uses genuinely remain.

The Only Remaining Uses

Working out where an old domain went: Did you inherit a site, a family domain or a client account set up before 2022? The trail runs through GratisDNS to one.com. The domain will be there now, under whichever email address the original owner used.

Checking a supplier’s claims: If a web agency or IT contractor tells you your DNS is “at GratisDNS”, that statement has been wrong since 2022. It’s a useful signal about how current their records are.

When NOT to Use GratisDNS

Every situation. But the specifics matter, because people still arrive here from search results that suggest otherwise.

Look Elsewhere If

You want free DNS hosting: This was the whole product and it’s gone. Cloudflare gives it away with no domain cap, and Hurricane Electric handles up to 50 domains free.

You want to register a .dk domain: GratisDNS can’t sell you one. one.com can, at DKK 9 the first year and DKK 128 after. Plenty of Danish registrars are cheaper at renewal.

You want Danish web hosting: Nothing is on offer. Our Denmark cloud hosting guide lists providers that are still trading.

Red Flags for Your Situation

• You found a “GratisDNS review 2026” giving it 4 stars: One large affiliate site still scores GratisDNS 4.2/5, lists a price range in euros, describes it as a subsidiary of Larsen Data selling shared hosting and cloud VPS, and offers a “Visit GratisDNS” button. That page has been updated nine times since 2018 and still doesn’t mention one.com or the closure. We verified this on 18 August 2026.
• You landed on gratis-dns.dk instead: That’s a different domain with a similar name. It returns no response at all and its own review profile scores 2.3/5 with nothing newer than September 2020. It is not a working alternative.
• Your registrar and your DNS are the same small company: This is the mistake that hurt GratisDNS customers most. When a provider closes, a website can be rebuilt and email can be re-pointed. A domain you can’t get released is a different problem. Keep the registrar and the DNS in separate hands.

GratisDNS Transparency Score

Here is how upfront the brand is with the information a buyer needs today:

• Company Information: Limited. No page on gratisdns.dk explains that the service closed, when, or what happened to customer accounts. The 2022 announcement sits in one.com’s news section, where nobody searching for GratisDNS will look.
• Pricing Transparency: Not applicable for GratisDNS, which publishes nothing. one.com prints renewal prices next to promotional ones, which is better than most. It then labels a 14.2x .dk renewal as pricing without surprises, which is not.
• Technical Documentation: Poor. Every GratisDNS guide, FAQ and forum thread went offline with the site. Archived copies exist, and nothing else does.
• Terms and Policies: Poor. No current terms exist. The historical ones, including the 30-day cancellation notice, aren’t published anywhere official.

Overall Transparency: Poor, and the failure is specific. A 301 redirect moves traffic. It doesn’t tell a twenty-year customer what happened to their account, and it leaves every stale review unchallenged.

Alternatives to GratisDNS

These are the services Danish users actually moved to, taken from the migration threads rather than picked by us:

For Free DNS Hosting: Cloudflare

Named in every thread we read. It’s free authoritative DNS, meaning Cloudflare’s servers hold the real records for your domain, with no limit on domains or records. You don’t have to use the proxy or CDN features to get it. Its API is supported directly by Let’s Encrypt for wildcard certificates. You can’t register a .dk domain there, so you buy the domain elsewhere and point the nameservers at Cloudflare. That split is good practice anyway.

For a Danish Provider: Simply.com

This was the most-recommended Danish destination in the migration threads, praised for its API and its support. It offers DNS hosting alongside its web hosting, so it’s the closest thing to a like-for-like Danish replacement.

For Many Domains on a Budget: Hurricane Electric

Free DNS for up to 50 domains, no account tier, no upsell. One Danish user migrated a domain to it within a day of the closure email and reported no trouble. It’s plain and technical, which is what GratisDNS was.

If you need mail as well as DNS, our email hosting guide covers providers that will host a domain’s mail without bundling a website.

Conclusion

Copy this result

GratisDNS ran for 21 years and served the DNS for roughly one in seven .dk domains at its peak. It closed quietly, on about a month’s notice. Its final rating is 3.2/5 across 131 reviews, and nothing has been added since the day the closure email went out.

The Bottom Line

Don’t shop for it. You can’t buy it. If you’re here because an old domain or an old contract mentions GratisDNS, your account is at one.com and has been since spring 2022. If you’re here because a review site recommended it, that review is at least four years out of date. Discount everything else on that page too.

People liked what GratisDNS did and disliked how it handled them, and the review record shows that gap widening for a decade before the sale. Its real legacy is the advice its customers repeated on the way out. Keep your domain registrar and your DNS provider separate, so losing one never costs you both. For current options, start with our shared hosting comparison.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is GratisDNS still working in 2026?

No. The gratisdns.dk domain redirects to one.com, and it has done since 2022. There’s no control panel, no signup and no support. one.com announced on 24 March 2022 that GratisDNS customers were moving to one.com plans from April 2022.

What happened to my GratisDNS domains?

They were transferred to one.com. Customers were emailed on 1 February 2022 and moved over the following weeks. Log in at one.com with the email address the domain was registered under. If you no longer have access to that address, you’ll need to contact one.com support with proof of ownership.

Is GratisDNS still free?

No, and the free tier didn’t survive the move. Two Danish users reported separately in February 2022 that they asked one.com support whether their three domains would remain free and were told no. one.com’s current pricing starts from a paid domain or hosting subscription.

What did customers complain about most?

Three things. Support charged per case, with reviewers reporting DKK 200 per session and DKK 800 to change contact details or restore access. Domain transfers out were slow or blocked. Invoice reminders were frequent and escalated to collections quickly. Complaints about tone were constant from 2010 onward.

What’s the best free replacement for GratisDNS?

Cloudflare, by a wide margin in Danish community discussion. It’s free, has no domain limit, and you can turn its proxy off and use it as plain DNS. Hurricane Electric is the other free option, capped at 50 domains. For a Danish provider, Simply.com came up most often.

Why do review sites still rate GratisDNS?

Because nobody re-checks. One large affiliate site still publishes a “GratisDNS Review 2026” scoring it 4.2/5, four years after the service closed. It has a live visit button and a euro price range. Aggregators inherit each other’s data and rarely test whether a provider can still take an order.

User Reviews for GratisDNS.dk