If you've ever been interested in boosting your internet speeds without paying extra for it...
Um, yes, please.
You may have seen that changing your DNS settings can help.
But what the heck does DNS mean, and what kind of DNS can actually make your browser noticeably faster?
DNS stands for Domain Name System, and it's a crucial part of how the web functions.
The primary job of DNS is to take the host's name of a website, say YouTube.com,
and translate it into a numerical address called an IP address
that tells your computer what server it needs to connect to in order to load that web page.
If you remember paper phone books, it's a little bit like how those would translate the name of a person or business
into a phone number you could call to reach them.
Or maybe you weren't born in the 20th century, I don't know.
When you type in the name of a website, or even just click a link,
your system sends a DNS query to determine the correct IP address.
But this process takes time, meaning a slow connection to a DNS server can result in delays before the page loads,
which we refer to as latency. But here's the thing, these days, most major internet service providers default to DNS servers that are pretty fast.
Although it's still possible to save time by changing to a faster DNS server
if you're noticing frequent problems with loading websites,
it's likely that this won't make much of a perceptible difference if you're only saving 10 or 20 milliseconds.
So does this mean that advice telling you to adjust your DNS is mostly useless?
I'm not so fast. Instead of trying to shave off a few milliseconds of latency
by changing to a commonly recommended public DNS, like Cloudflare or Google,
what might be more impactful is switching to a filtering DNS service that blocks ads.
You see, when you load a webpage with ads, you aren't just making one DNS request for the actual website you're visiting.
Instead, your system has to send lots of DNS requests,
because the ads on that page often live on completely different domains.
Not only does this add more latency since you're making additional requests,
but loading all these ads can seriously slow down your browser's performance.
Even if they aren't that large in terms of file size, modern ads often involve lots of scripts.
Basically, extra code your browser has to run,
which can make your browser feel sluggish or even non-responsive,
and have even worse consequences if the script contains malware.
This is a big part of the reason that some webpages on smartphones can be very frustrating to scroll through.
Not only do all those ads take up a lot of screen real estate,
but your phone's CPU can have a hard time keeping up with all those scripts.
And this can be an issue on lower-end PCs as well.
A filtering DNS service can mitigate this problem by blocking DNS requests to known advertising servers,
so none of these scripts or other junk from ads makes it to your PC or phone in the first place.
But wait a sec, we already have ad blocking extensions in apps, so why would I want to use a filtering DNS?
Well, one advantage you might want to consider is that because all you have to do to use a filtering DNS
is change a setting in your operating system or on your router,
there isn't any software overhead. Lightning the load on your CPU, reducing battery consumption, and decreasing the possibility of software bugs.
And if we're talking specifically about a phone or a laptop,
assigning a filtering DNS will protect you no matter where you take it,
instead of having it rely on whichever DNS server your cellular provider or a random public Wi-Fi network uses.
We're going to link an article in the video description giving you instructions on how to change your DNS server.
Don't worry, it's not hard. As well as a list of ad blocking DNS services you can try out for yourself.
One thing to keep in mind though is that unlike ad blocking extensions,
filtering DNS services can't clean up the webpage for you after blocking those ads.
So you'll just see a blank space where the ad was supposed to go,
leaving you wondering what kind of marvelous product you're missing out on hearing about.
What if it was cool? What if I wanted it? Hey, that was a tech wiki. Thanks for watching.
If you liked this video, check out our other video on how Chrome is crippling ad blocking extensions.
Possibly making ad blocking DNS even more appealing. What a great recommendation!