Sunday, March 5, 2017

A better public DNS for FREE

TL;DR

Instead of using your ISP's DNS, use the faster and more reliable Google Public DNS instead: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Your ISP's DNS

Like most people, I defaulted to using my ISP's DNS. For the most part, this works just fine. Until recently, we encountered various problems such as:
  1. Problems connecting to a specific website - This worked fine when I used my mobile network to connect instead.
  2. Slow to update - I made changes to my personal domain's DNS settings. It took forever to resolve to the right one. However, other parts of the world were already resolving this correctly.

Use Google Public DNS

Then my research pointed me to Google Public DNS here: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/
Advantages:
  1. Google DNS is faster 
  2. It claims to have more security
  3. It's free! And nothing beats free.
Disadvantages:
  1. Yet another way Google is tracking you. But I'm sure you know resistance is futile.
  2. Ah, nothing else yet. I'll revisit this post when I think of another one.

How to use it

To try it out, I suggest configuring a single machine to use it. If you want all your machines to use it, simply change you router's DHCP settings to dispense these settings below. (Yes, I'm make a lot of assumptions here. But if I'm sure you know what I mean.)
Here are Google DNS servers IP addresses:
  • Primary DNS: 8.8.8.8
  • Secondary DNS: 8.8.4.4

Feedback

I'll try this out myself for a while and update the post as necessary. If you do have any feedback, please feel free to let me know. Thanks!

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