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Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2048·

another decent alternative fallback with the same featureset is quad9

https://www.quad9.net/

The core feature of Cloudflare's DNS is getting you closer and faster resolves to their CDN (probably one of the largest at this point, barring the established enterprise encumbants) in a privacy-first way.

Quad9's goal seems to be about threat-detection and prevention.

It would be nice if you could have both simultaneously (and maybe you can), but at the moment both services are actually quite different.

9.9.9.10 is "quad nine without the threat detection" from memory.

Yeah, but the reason why 1.1.1.1 is so fast for sites that use Cloudflare as DNS is because Cloudflare is the authoritative DNS for them.

The only way you get that in a more generic sense is if a specialist DNS CDN provider started up that provided DNS services for all the existing CDNs (or they all agreed to some type of federated standard that let them share the same recursive multicast IP addresses for DNS resolution).

Also, Cloudflare has a huge amount of data centres by now, probably more than any other service. Even Google often underperforms them. Debatable if a few ms make a difference but it can for people living in remote areas where CF has a centre and the next 9.9.9.9/8.8.8.8 is 100ms away.

It's important to note that the cloudflare dns does not send the EDNS Client Subnet header which can have a negative impact depending on where you live.

or a positive privacy impact depending on where you live :)

I'm on Google Fiber and 1.1.1.1 is often 1ms for me and googles DNS is ~8-12ms.

It's amazing how fast it is.

I guess Google doesn't deploy DNS at each edge. Otherwise it's hard to explain that you often get >5ms in major cities.

Maybe check out what NS1 is doing with DNS

https://ns1.com/

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