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:
If you are in France, or around Europe and don’t mind sending your Pi via mail to them, Faimaison and Tetaneutral do propose small computers hosting in their datacenter racks, Pi type included, but also NUCs, respectively for 24€/month (bit expensive but small structure compared to Tetaneutral edit: it’s ~15€/month nowadays) and 5 to 10€ / month. That’s just an example. Generally you’ll get one IPv4 and one /56 or /64 IPv6 prefix.
You might want to look near your location if there is a LUG, non-profit ISP, or non-profit colocation proposing the same kind of services. You may even meet some nice people! But it’s definitely doable at least in Europe.