Has your internet slowed down considerably? This might be due to the extra load ISP DNS Servers are having.
More and more people continue to work from home during this pandemic. Not to mention that the closures of schools are forcing students to take online courses at home. All of which, are putting an extra load on ISP's DNS servers.
I work as a software engineer in the US and my ISP has proven to be very reliable until this week. All of the online services I use to do my work started to slow down to the point that I was no longer happy.
I quickly fired up the terminal and ran the nslookup command to resolve the name of one of the services I use. The command was very slow to complete. That's when I realized that my ISP DNS servers were slow to resolve the IP addresses.
As always, security and privacy is a concern. I did some searches online and turned up this article on medium that breaks down the security, privacy, and performance of various DNS services. After I looked at the results of that article, I decided to go with Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1.
Since my home router does not allow changing the DNS server, I decided to make Cloudflare's DNS server my primary DNS server on my development devices at home. Perhaps not being able to change the DNS server on the routers is a good thing. That will keep devices like TVs and iPads off these DNS servers.
After making this change, my web experience was very much restored. My pages were loading faster than ever before and online services went back to normal. Overall, this small change really helped me to be more productive at home.
Changing this setting is different from one operating system to the next. If you are not sure how to change those settings, you can google how to change these settings or refer an article like this.
Be productive while WFH!
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