Speed up your Internet with faster DNS

Via Gizmodo, Cloudflare has recently launched its own DNS service that has blazing speeds for resolving website addresses.

DNS, or Domain Name System, is how your computer looks up where to deliver pages to your web browser from. For example, when you type in facebook.com, the first thing your computer does is ask a DNS server where Google’s web page is stored. The DNS server has a giant list of what the internet address of every domain name is.

By speeding up this first step, everything you do on the internet becomes faster. And DNS isn’t just for websites – your company’s servers, mobile phone apps, basically everything relies on DNS.

“While being a few milliseconds faster might not seem like a big deal, since DNS is the foundation of everything online, whenever you click on a link, or send an email, or open a mobile app, almost every action you take requires as DNS lookup,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Gizmodo. “So those milliseconds add up pretty quickly.”

Also, since Cloudflare main mission is maximizing speed and protection for websites, they have a different business model than your internet service provider or even DNS hosted by companies like Google.

The other true benefit here is that Cloudflare’s perspective on handling user data. Prince said the company views user data as a “toxic asset,” something it strives to either never collect or delete as quickly as possible.

“Just at a policy level, Cloudflare’s business has never been advertising or selling consumer data,” Prince said. “As we started to talk to various browser manufacturers and others about what we were doing, they would come back and say, ‘Well, we don’t want you to retain logs for any longer than a week, we don’t want you selling any of the data.’ And I think they were kind of surprised when we returned back and said, ‘Actually, we prefer never to write any personally identifiable information to disk and guarantee that we’ll wipe all of the transactional logs and bug tracking logs within 24 hours.’”

The addresses of the Cloudflare DNSA servers are also unbelieviable easy to remember: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 – beautiful!

For instructions on settingyour computer to use these new options, read more at Gizmodo.com.