Cloudflare recently released 1.1.1.1, their public DNS service, designed to speed up your internet connection. Whilst OpenDNS and Google DNS do exist, Cloudflare place an emphasis on privacy, promising to wipe all DNS query logs in 24 hours. So, what is a DNS? In a nutshell, a DNS exists to point a URL, like thenerdystudent.com, towards an IP where the website exists. However, DNS’ that are provided by ISPs are often unreliable, and that is where Cloudflare comes in. It offers better performance than your ISPs DNS server, and better security and privacy.
Cloudflare allow you to use their 1.1.1.1 public DNS services on your desktop, and on your mobile phone with free apps. These then install a profile which routes your traffic through the DNS, allowing you to get faster searches and site loads.
If you want to find out more information on how exactly 1.1.1.1 works, you can do so on the Cloudflare website here. So, how does 1.1.1.1 speed up your browsing? Cloudflare uses aggressive caching in order to be able to serve you the IP addresses that you want to access quicker, and therefore having the site load quicker. For example, this site loads resources from multiple IP addresses, such as the Patreon and Disqus plugin. Cloudflare knows where those are from, and therefore can quickly load up the IPs and skip the wait for your ISP to find them.
If you reload this article, you may find that it loads much quicker than it did on the first load. That’s because it’s been cached for you and your ISP knows where to load the resources. With 1.1.1.1, this isn’t needed and it all loads quickly as it has been cached by Cloudflare previously.
That’s how 1.1.1.1 works in a nutshell. If you want to find out more, I would recommend that you check out the Cloudflare site on how it works, which goes into a lot more detail.
1.1.1.1 is also the fastest public DNS server, depending on your location. You can look at the performance and speed of various public DNS servers on this site, and compare them to see which one is fastest in your region.
To set up 1.1.1.1 as your DNS server, you can visit the website. It offers great guides on how to do it on your desktop and laptop.
On mobile it is much more simple, for both Android and iOS. Simply download the app, install the profile, and you can enable and disable it. It also allows you to disable it for a certain amount of time, or enable it when you change network.For those with slow and unreliable networks, like me, 1.1.1.1 is a great solution. It makes connections a lot more stable, makes sites load faster, and I’ve been very impressed with it. Plus, it’s completely free. The privacy it gives is also nice, but if you are concerned about that I would recommend you use a VPN instead.
1.1.1.1 is a great tool for those who have slow connections to get sites to load much faster. In addition, it makes your browsing a lot more stable, and I would recommend you give it a try.