What is VesperNet?

As with any project, it begins with a need or a thought which spins off into an idea. It doesn't necessarily have to be a good one - Interpret this as you will, but please save me your snarky comments.
So, as I was working on an old machine of mine I usually tend to need to spin up a web browser and look up some resources, and let me tell you; the world wide web today is not what the world wide web once was.
Extreme SSL requirements, ads, telemetry data being sent left and right, invasive tracking .. and the list goes on, it would be a surprise if it is possible to reach a working resource without the browser application crashing or locking up the entire system.

But then, what if I could build my own tiny network, I had previously forked the ucanet project and begun to make improvements there. That's a good start, I thought.
While ucanet is a great idea and an awesome project, it's not in line with what I have in mind - I don't have the need to browse user pages on NeoCities, nor visiting the past, which ProtoWeb offers. And the DNS server is fairly limited, I want and need more!

And here we are, high time to delete the ucanet fork and begin anew, map out the basic requirements and get cracking ... but wait ...

A project needs a name, and a name it was given that late evening; Vesper.
For those versed in Classical Latin, from the English word evening we translate it to its Latin counterpart, vesper. It holds no particular meaning other than the translation and time of birth for the project itself.

VesperNet, the Evening Network?
Well, I guess, it's the most active time out of the given 24 hours per day where there is time to have fun / explore ideas / tinker in general - though I guess that's up for debate depending on who you ask.

Anyways, VesperNet at the core is a DNS server, supporting

Master / Slave synchronization
UDP / TCP
DNS Zones
DNS Records
SOA, A, CNAME, NS, MX, TXT, PTR
Zone Cache via Redis
Response Cache via in-memory storage
DNS Compression
Experimental private network gating
Self-Protection
From malformed queries, malicious traffic and more
Whitelisting
For services that need to go above and beyond the normal rate-limits
Blacklisting
Automatic and manual

The DNS server is of course in active development, as issues arise or requirements change.
It has also reached a point in development where anything new or any changes have to be considered carefully, as I (personally) would currently class this as enterprise grade software.

In short
After reading all subsections, you should of have come to the understanding that VesperNet is a neat little ecosystem / network, ready for use and expansion. By a user, for users.

Next subsection: Why was VesperNet created?