Changing your DNS provider to Cloudflare. Let’s see if we can improve our browsing experience.

Cloudflare

So I just thought I would see how quick our internet provider was and what I could do to make it quicker still:

I ran 10 different tests which you can find how to do it here (I essentially spun up a ubuntu Virtual machine and then entered the few lines of code needed):

https://github.com/cleanbrowsing/dnsperftest

These were the results:

DNS results
DNS results

 

The above shows that Cloudflare is currently the fastest DNS server out there for me with an average of 54.50ms and so I am changing my DNS server to them from Google (90.60ms).

For those of you who don’t know what a DNS server is, it’s effectively the tool that translates the domain name like google.com or youtube.com to the actual address of the server, i.e. for google.com it’s 173.194.222.113

Therefore, anything you pull down over the web has to go through the DNS.

Most Internet service providers use their own one by default for one reason or another (you can google why, am not spreading conspiracy theories). I have changed our one from the default to Google, and saw a performance increase, however now I am going to change it again to Cloudflare.

You can read about them here:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/

 

In essence, for those who don’t understand this but want potentially faster speeds, you just go to your internet connection on your router (if you want the whole apartment) or your tablet/phone (if you want to test per device) and then go into advanced settings on the connection.

Cloudflare DNS servers
Cloudflare DNS servers

 

You usually see DNS server 1 and DNS server 2 (here enter the following)

DNS Server 1:     1.1.1.1

DNS Server 2      1.0.0.1

Apply and that’s it. Check your browsing speed to see if it’s increased. You might not notice it, you might see it speed up heaps. YMMV

The numbers there might look small in difference, but imagine every single picture and text from every source on the web needs to go through these, so small increases can add up to a snappier response.

 

There’s also Cloudflare DNS servers that block malware (sites trying to give you a virus or steal), and also DNS servers that block adult sites (I know, it’s a thing!). You can read more on here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNKgnycpZhg&t

Anti malware:    1.1.1.2 / 1.0.0.2

Anti Adult          1.1.1.3 / 1.0.0.3

 

If you want to give google’s servers a spin:

Google                  8.8.8.8 / 8.8.4.4

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