Cloudflare, a company known primarily for its DDoS attack protection on the internet, has just announced its own consumer Domain Name System (DNS) service, that promises to keep your browsing history safe while also speeding up your internet significantly. The service is using https://1.1.1.1 as its DNS resolver which is currently processing queries at 14.01ms, making it the internet’s fastest DNS service.
The company has worked with APNIC to offer its DNS service through 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. “We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system,” says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. “We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.”
“The answer to why we built the service goes back to our mission: to help build a better Internet. People come to work at Cloudflare every day in order to make the Internet better, more secure, more reliable, and more efficient. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true.
Walk around the office and our team’s laptops are adorned with 1.1.1.1 stickers because we’re all proud of what we’re doing. That alone made building this a no brainer.”
Setting up Cloudflare’s DNS on your device is very easy. All you need to do is visit this link on your device and Cloudflare will automatically recognize your hardware and give you the instructions for switching over to its DNS service.
Below is a quick tutorial on how to set up 1.1.1.1 DNS on your Mac:
That’s it! You have successfully setup CloudFlare’s free DNS service on your Mac. CloudFlare also says “We committed to never writing the querying IP addresses to disk and wiping all logs within 24 hours,” as well, which is a huge win for privacy.
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interesting. does this block ads on Apple TV? especially youtube app?
no
yeah tried but it didn’t blocks ads.
I always find this type of DNS blockers a bit sketchy…
Try pi-hole instead. Can run on any platform, including Docker. Been using it for a few months and it’s great!
Thanks but installation seems complicated and requires a raspberry pi.
Doesn’t require a Raspberry Pi, you can run it on Windows, Mac, Linux. Easiest is to run it as a container in Docker on any of those platforms. Lots and lots of how-to guides if you’re interested, it works really well!
Ooooh very cool! Gonna switch my home router to this and, if it goes well, I might switch my company over too! Anything but Google lol
“CloudFare’s” misspelled title should be “CloudFlare’s”
Just as a note, I did speed tests and it does NOT speed up your internet. I went from 30ms ping to about 100ms using 1.1.1.1 and the speed was declined about 10-20%… That being said, it’s wicked fast for what it is and if you value privacy this is a no brainer.
That’s not possible.
DNS does not affect download/upload speeds.
You are wrong.
DNS will usually « redirect » you to the nearest content provider servers.
Ex youtube has servers all around the globe. Google’s dns will return ip addresses for servers that are near you. So dns answers might be slower… but access to content will be faster.
Problem with 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9 is that they will return results for the nearest servers/Ip addresses for them… and those addresses might not necessarily be the nearest for you.
You are somewhat correct. However, many, if not all, big brands have CDN networks that will find the best server. In those cases DNS’ job won’t be to find the best server but only to direct you to the “landing” page. Netflix is really good at this.
Overall, DNS will not affect your download or latency.
Exactly. Especially with all the known issues with Rogers’ DNS (I have Rogers internet).
Fast, maybe.
Thank you for posting this. I would say it’s probably worthwhile to switch to CloudFlare then, especially if you have concerns about Google and relentless their data-mining.
The link doesn’t work on my iPhone as of 7:50pm PST
That is all well and cool, BUT does it blend????
Updated my routers DNS, which also updated all my connected devices (I checked)
I noticed almost right away when loading webpages, they load almost instantly, without the initial hang time it normally did before. Thanks for the heads up!