Cloudflare Public DNS Service : Setting Up in Windows and Testing Speed

Cloudflare started out this month by introducing a new service for everyone – public DNS service that focuses on privacy. Just like the public DNS service provided by Google, Cloudflare has also introduced easy-to-remember IPv4 servers  – 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. They claim that their servers are faster than even those of Google and offer better privacy. You can visit the website https://1.1.1.1/ to find more about the Cloudflare DNS service and how to set it up. But you if want to quickly set Cloudflare DNS in Windows, then you can follow these steps:

  1. Download Public DNS Server Tool from https://www.trishtech.com/downloads/public_dns.zip.
  2. Extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP to a folder and launch PublicDNS.exe.Cloudflare DNS
  3. Select the NIC that you are using, select Cloudflare DNS and then click on the Change button.
  4. You should see a successful operation message and your system is ready to use Cloudflare DNS.

How do you find out if your system has been set to use Cloudflare DNS? You can find out easily by using the nslookup command. Here is how:

  1. Press Win+X to open the admin menu in Windows. Then press C or select Command Prompt from the menu to open a command prompt window.
  2. Type nslookup spotify.com and press Enter in the command prompt.Cloudflare DNS
  3. If you see Server: 1dot1dot1dot1dot.cloudflare-dns.com then you have been using Cloudflare DNS.

Even though Cloudflare is touting their DNS service as fastest, you should check everything yourself as servers may respond slower or faster depending on your location in the world and your internet connection. You can use GRC DNS Benchmark tool for this.

Cloudflare DNS

All you have to do is download the tool from https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm and launch it. The tool does not have Cloudflare DNS added to it at this time, so you have to add them manually. You can add them by clicking on the Add/Remove button, typing in 1.1.1.1 and clicking on the Add button. Repeat the same for 1.0.0.1. After this, you can click on the Run Benchmark button to see how all the DNS services perform. In our test, Cloudflare DNS did not turn out to be the fastest and stayed behind both Google DNS and OpenDNS.

2 comments

  1. I have been using Cloudflare this week and about 3:00pm PDT today 4/5/18 it went down and would not resolve addresses properly. I switched back to Quad9 for now. I will test again later in a month or two once they work out reliability.

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