NextDNS is my new favourite DNS service (2020) | Hacker News Reader

NextDNS is my new favourite DNS service (2020)

stanislas.blog

33 pointsmefengl14 comments

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I've been a nextdns paying customer for years.

it's great service.

my only issue with it is that when sites break, it is hard to fix (by adding and exclusion / whitelist).

I wish they had some browser extension that let me whitelist more easily

Same here. I wish the App would allow me to add / edit whitelist.

I dont have actual data to back it up, but out of the DNS services, ad-blocking or not. I feel NextDNS has the fastest DNS Network. And it is very consistent.

To the point I wish NextDNS would start offering Managed DNS services like Amazon Route 53 or DnsMadeEasy.

I don't have any data either, but I don't think DNS is perceptible as something that is fast or slow, considering that the vast amount of recursive servers which is what clients connect to, aggressively cache. Add to this that most have a low latency connection to their DNS server whether it be their last mile ISP or an anycast provider which is virtually all public resolvers.

That was initially what I thought as well. Until I tried out Google DNS, and then Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 before settling on NextDNS.

It does have a great impact.

Nowadays TTL are pretty short because infra is very dynamic, you don't necessarily hit the cache that often. And a random webpage will pull assests from all over the place, with many different domains/subdomains, all requiring DNS resolution.

In the end, even if it's hidden you can definitely feel it in the "snapiness" of loading webpages. Of course when you only load/stream content it has no impact, so it is really dependent on your usage patterns.

Running your own private DNS resolver is also much faster, even with a medium org, you can definitely feel it.

That’s by someone who hasn’t discovered controld.

I tried controld and wasn't impressed. In what way is controld better than nextdns?

I also switched to controld after a period of unreliability from from NextDNS. NextDNS is a little easier and a little faster, and perhaps better for auditing a network, but controld overall has more features. Differentiators: more granular control in blocking related functionality, can replace your VPN for certain use cases, control over traffic flow and proxying, etc

I somewhat begrudgingly switched to ControlD after years with NextDNS.

The NextDNS web UI is flippin fast and very simple. Feels more akin to HN. ControlD’s is slow and feels so heavy. Maybe more like new Reddit.

ControlD offers Hagezi’s TIF list and allows custom lists to be set. NextDNS’s built-in TIF is very opaque. This was really the deciding factor for me. Unfortunately.

I use NextDNS since 2021, after a frustrating experience with Pi-Hole in a Raspberry Pi 3b (system broke by itself every other month, I think because faulty SD cards).

NextDNS is so good, and their free tier so generous, that sometimes I feel bad for not having to pay for it. Can’t recommend enough.

inb4 "tailscale hurr durr",

if you are using tailscale already, with it setup as the DNS resolver,

you can setup NextDNS as the global resolver within tailscale[1];

i'm not sure exactly how much my latency's being affected, but am at something like 900k queries/mo and don't really notice it

[1] https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns

this post is from 2020

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