The company
Hospitable is the short-term rental industry's premier super app, built to give hosts and property managers their time back. Launched in 2016 as a time-saving property management system, it has grown into a toolkit that automates guest messaging with AI, optimizes nightly rates, coordinates teams, and syncs across booking channels like Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Agoda, and Google Vacation Rentals without double-booking. Today it supports tens of thousands of hosts worldwide.
The 80-plus person team serves everyone from part-time hosts self-managing a single property to professional property managers with hundreds of properties in their portfolio. One of Hospitable's standout products lets hosts launch their own direct booking website in minutes, with guest vetting, damage protection, and payments built in, so they can build a brand and a booking relationship directly with guests rather than relying on a third-party channel for discovery.
That direct booking product is where domains and DNS enter the picture. When a host wants to level up their site, they can buy a custom domain through Hospitable, which then points that domain at its own infrastructure to host the site. Hosts can also bring a domain they already own: they update their name servers to point at Hospitable, and Hospitable manages the DNS and hosts the site the same way. DNSimple handles the registrar side, and Hospitable has built its own DNS management screen on top of the DNSimple API so customers can manage their records without ever leaving the product.
The opportunity: custom domains for direct booking
Hospitable's story didn't begin with a painful incident or a pile of scattered registrar logins. It began with a product gap: the early direct booking websites were hosted on subdomains Hospitable already owned, so there was no DNS to manage at all. The team wanted to let hosts run their direct booking site on their own custom domain, and to make that as frictionless as possible.
Not so much a pain point as a product gap. We wanted to offer customers the option to host on their own custom domain and needed to remove the friction around doing that. We wanted to elevate the product and find a programmatic way to handle domain purchasing and DNS management through APIs, rather than it being a manual or clunky process.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
That shaped what they looked for: an API-first platform they could embed directly into a customer-facing product, rather than a console for the team to click through.
Choosing DNSimple
Hospitable found DNSimple through general research online. They evaluated the space, including Entri, and DNSimple stood out for being simpler to adopt from end to end.
It came across as simpler overall, easier API docs, easier to get started, and a lower price point to get in compared to Entri. Overall it came down to being easier to get started and use, with a lower commitment.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
A few capabilities were deciding factors. White-label vanity name servers let Hospitable present a branded DNS experience rather than surfacing the underlying registrar, which was essential for a white-label custom-domain product. Being able to purchase domains through the API meant registration could be automated inside the product instead of handled manually. And broad TLD coverage gave hosts real choice at the point of purchase.
Implementation and automation
Because there was no existing DNS setup to migrate, this was a greenfield build. The team built against the API directly and moved quickly.
It was a greenfield build for us, so there wasn't really a migration involved. We built against the API pretty quickly, took maybe a couple of weeks to get an MVP up and ready. The API was very easy to build against, and we tested a fair bit in production itself, we bought our first few domains live to validate things. Overall it was a simple, smooth implementation.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
Hospitable uses the DNSimple API (not Terraform or the CLI) mainly for domain registration and DNS record management. More recently the team has expanded its use of webhooks for asynchronous lifecycle events, and has worked with DNSimple on feature requests to extend them further.
How Hospitable uses DNSimple day to day
Hospitable runs all host domains from a single DNSimple account, with separation handled in its own product layer rather than through per-customer sub-accounts. Each domain maps to one host, and hosts manage everything inside the Hospitable UI without ever getting direct DNSimple access. Billing lives in the Hospitable product, not as separate DNSimple billing per customer. Normal host flows are fully automated through the API, with no manual DNS edits for day-to-day operations; production automation authenticates with a scoped API token held in Hospitable's secrets system and used only by its domain automation services. Engineering staff have least-privilege console access reserved for support and incidents, and the DNSimple sandbox is used for development and testing.
Vanity name servers have become important to the product. All managed DNS runs behind Hospitable-branded name servers on hsptbl.com (ns1 through ns4), so hosts see the Hospitable brand rather than a generic registrar.
Hosts see Hospitable-branded nameservers, not generic registrar names, which is important for a white-label custom-domain product. We can change routing targets in automation without asking every host to update nameservers at the registrar. They already point at our vanity set.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
On security and resilience, the pieces that matter most are reliable anycast DNS for host zones, a stable API and webhooks for the registrar and DNS lifecycle, name server verification before a domain is marked ready, and SSO/MFA for staff paired with scoped API tokens for automation. TLS for custom sites is terminated at Hospitable's edge (Caddy with Let's Encrypt), kept deliberately separate from DNSimple. The custom-domains product talks directly to the DNSimple API rather than routing through the Domain Control Plane, which the team notes could help consolidate engineering visibility later, even though it isn't part of the current workflow.
Results and outcomes
Sam puts the biggest impact plainly.
The biggest impact is that DNSimple powers our entire custom-domains product. Hosts can buy or connect a domain and launch a branded Direct booking site without manual DNS work from our team. Registration, DNS, and nameserver delegation are automated through the API. Custom domains went from an ops-heavy edge case to a self-serve feature that scales with the business.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
There isn't a tidy before-and-after metric to point to, so Sam points to the scale instead.
We do not have a clean before/after baseline from when we built this on DNSimple, but the scale today speaks for itself: 2,500 custom sites operating through DNSimple-managed DNS, and 500 domains purchased through DNSimple via our product. Those numbers reflect thousands of hosts who got a custom domain live quickly, without our team touching registrar consoles or zone files for each one. DNS-related support load stayed manageable as volume grew, and we have had very few DNSimple-related incidents overall.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
Internally, day-to-day DNS work is API-driven rather than manual, so engineering spends its time on product logic and support edge cases instead of repetitive zone edits, and the sandbox lets the team develop and test domain flows without touching production zones. Because one integration handles the registrar and zone lifecycle for thousands of domains, Hospitable can onboard hosts onto custom domains at volume without adding headcount for DNS operations. Hosts get a guided flow that takes them from searching for a domain to purchasing or connecting it, delegating branded name servers, and linking their site, so they can be live on their own domain quickly. That speed is a big part of what makes direct booking work.
Asked whether his view of DNSimple has changed over the years, Sam means his answer as a compliment.
DNSimple has been a stable, dependable layer we built on top of. The API and webhooks do what we need, issues have been rare, and it largely just works. We chose DNSimple to power a customer-facing product, not as a side tool, and it has held up at scale without changing how we think about the partnership.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
Support and partnership
That "just works" experience extends to the account relationship.
We have a great working relationship with Rufiz, he's always there to help and guide, maintaining a casual but effective partnership. Having a good account manager always matters. As far as I'm aware we haven't had many direct interactions with support, a testament to the simplicity and 'just works' factor.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
Build, buy, and boring partners
For a product company, one of the bigger questions is always build versus buy. When Hospitable buys, it favors reliability over novelty.
One of the big questions product companies come up against is build or buy, and when buying we look for boring partners. That's a compliment, chaos isn't good for us or our customers. DNSimple is boring, and boring is effective.
— Sam Jones Director of Engineering at Hospitable
If you're building custom domains, DNS, or a white-label site experience into your own product, or you have questions about what DNSimple's API, vanity name servers, and webhooks can do for your platform, drop us a line. We'd love to chat.
