Against much well-informed advice, I use a vanity domain for my internal network at home. Through a combination Smallstep CA, CoreDNS, and Traefik, any services I host in my Docker Swarm cluster automatically are immediately issued a signed SSL certificate, load-balanced, and resolvable. Traefik also allows me to configure authentication for any services that I may not wish to expose without such.
That said, I do recommend the use of the internal. zone for any such setup, as others have commented. This article provides some good reasons why (at least for .local) you should aim to use a standards-compliant internal zone: https://community.veeam.com/blogs-and-podcasts-57/why-using-...
replies(2):