Use 1.1.1.1 to Speed Up Your Personal Internet Connection!
Spin Group is always looking for new tools and methods to speed up websites. These include coding clean CSS and measuring performance with Google Insights. These actions and tools are great, but every once in a while we find a trick that will help performance across the board with little extra effort. One way we do this is using the 1.1.1.1 DNS server from Cloudflare and APNIC. And to make things even better–you can use it too to speed up your personal internet connection everywhere you browse for free.
What is it?
The 1.1.1.1 DNS server is a faster-than-average DNS directory. What does this mean? Well, every time you type the name of a website into your browser, a request is sent to a domain-name-server (DNS). This DNS converts this written name into numbers (the IP address) that the servers understand. This is a bit of an oversimplification–the DNS request actually goes through a series of servers to find the correct IP address of the server you're lookin' for. The important thing to know is that your request (like www.example.com) is sent to servers to change the name to an IP address so it can find the right server that will send you back the website.
Usually, your internet service provider automatically provides DNS servers, so why not use those? Well, you could, but they are not as fast or secure as the 1.1.1.1 DNS server. According to DNSperf.com, 1.1.1.1 is the fastest DNS service (by quite a margin I might add!). View the graph below to see the performance difference in DNS requests. Also, 1.1.1.1 offers the security advantage of not logging your IP address like ISP's traditionally do. This protects users against ISP's selling internet usage data.
Pretty fast, eh? That's why we use it!
As a final note, since DNS requests are required for all internet website requests, using 1.1.1.1 will speed up your internet access everywhere on the internet.
How to Use It
So this is all well and good, but obviously you need to pay your hackery-gamer neighbor kid to set this up for you, right? Nope! Setting up 1.1.1.1 as your primary DNS server is...well...pretty darn simple. Since there are a couple of different ways to use it depending on what device you are using, I recommend that you go to http://1.1.1.1 and follow their instructions.