Details at the end.

SUCCESS!!!! found one that supports glue records:

Hostfactory

Failed attempts:

• Cyon - no glue records
• Novatrend - no glue records
• Hostpoint - no glue records

next to try maybe?
- Infomaniak - hard to get only a domain
- Metanet - pricing feels dishonest

look up others: https://www.nic.ch/registrars/

list of swiss ASNs and the number of IPs they have, to help get an idea of how big a chosen registrar may be (not a super strong signal)

• https://ipinfo.io/countries/ch#section-asns
• https://whoisrequest.com/ip/ch

Background:

Most/All? domain registrars offer an option to point the domain at any arbitrary DNS server so you can manage your DNS records without using their web interface. if you buy somedomain.ch and have a dns server running at ns1.mydnshost.ch that works fine.

However: if you want to run that DNS server withhin that same domain (say you buy somedomain.ch and want to use ns1.somedomain.ch as a dns server) there's a chicken-and-egg problem: how does someone know where ns1.somedomain.ch is when they don't yet know where somedomain.ch is? so we need one initial entry for ns1.somedomain.ch pointing to an IP address at the "top" level, at the .ch level. we can't directly manage entries for .ch, so our registrar needs to make that entry for us. This is called a "glue record".

Cloudns.net does offer the glue records, but i am looking for a more local option now.

How i found one:

Switch makes the ".ch" zone file public - 15 million records, a 1.3GB file you can download (once a day maximum according to them).

That zonefile contains plenty of domains with "glue records" - i simply did some whois lookups for them and hostpoint came up.