Put HE (dns.he.net) in your back pocket - they run a free DNS service which includes slave (do we still call it that?) service so that you can add their resolver as an ultimate failover / failback if your self hosted DNS takes a dive for whatever reason things break in our world.
Generally, hosting your own DNS “should” mean having a primary and secondary on separate AS networks, or at least different provider routes or locations. But if you’re doing all this from home, where is the second location for DR purposes… exactly? I sure don’t have one, power goes out here everything goes dark - in the old days everyone used to do this (share out tertiary DNS to each other) but it’s become a thing of the past in today’s world. HE can help fill that gap.
To your point - I use Gcore DNS and Bunny DNS for my stuff, as I mainly use online VPSes and don’t run racks of hardware at the house. The only things I physically selfhost at home are a pair of old laptops acting as storage servers which backup all my bytes and bits from online to some SSDs.
It sounds good but in practice it doesn’t work out; laptops sleep, people put their phones on airplane at night, whatever happens in life. The “best” solutions use some sort of cache-and-forward relay (thinking like DeltaChat relays, or I hear SimpleX is adding them) but I think most end up looking at Snikket (xmpp) or Matrix for the group management etc. on a central server. The Disroot group uses “Movim” which is XMPP highly customized to a social experience.
I use DeltaChat with friends and there’s a lot of things you can’t do because it’s essentially P2P with caching relays - like Jami, all control and data is stored on the device(s). If all you’re looking for is a Signal replacement it’s great (and why we use it), but if you want good group social controls you gotta go the central server route.
I think Jami here could do with caching relays like Delta has, could move this project to the next level.