Why does Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 provide free service? What’s the benefit?
Officially: It’s a joint project between Cloudflare and APNIC, and Cloudflare was given the address space in return for anonymized data about all of the garbage data reaching 1.1.1.1
My opinion: Cloudflare does have a good motive, and overall it’s great for privacy - however, the exclusion of ECS in the name of “privacy” leads me to think they’re using 1.1.1.1 to get more websites on Cloudflare, or at least away from their competition from Akamai and Fastly. Cloudflare’s competition relies on ECS for end users to reach the correct PoP instead of Anycast, which is what Cloudflare uses. This means if you use 1.1.1.1 and connect to a website using ECS, you’ll be routed to a node farther away and have a worse experience.
These days, I almost always recommend people use Quad9+ECS (9.9.9.11) because they’ll get super fast DNS with privacy, and the speed of reaching the correct PoPs.
Cross sell other paid services. If you are using the free plan, you’ll be asked to unlock more services in the portal
Thank you. I’ve been using Quad9 for some time now, but I didn’t know about this. I’ll be updating my config accordingly!
I agree, lately I made some tests with some Private DNS providers and I can say that ECS is very important especially for streaming services:
Some large content providers like Netflix, Facebook or Google as well as CDNs like Akamai have servers hosted directly inside ISP networks. Their DNS will only steer clients to those ISP embedded servers if the IP of the resolver or the subnet provided through ECS is part of the ISP’s IP space. ECS is thus required for public DNS resolvers to benefit from those servers.
With many of the tested DNS servers, I get redirected to a distant CDN node and have a subpar experience (Cloudflare, ControlD, Adguard DNS) but with NextDNS that supports Anonymized EDNS it works as it should.
what’s the secondary DNS for 9.9.9.11?
I can assure you upselling is not the primary of 1.1.1.1
I used quad9 for a while. And some of stuff would take forever to load or time out. I usually switch between cloudfare, opendns or adguard dns.
I’m an interesting outlier because I actually get slower performance on a lot of sites when using ECS.
IPv4
9.9.9.11
149.112.112.11
IPv6
2620:fe::11
2620:fe::fe:11
HTTPS
https://dns11.quad9.net/dns-query
TLS
tls://dns11.quad9.net
More can be found here: Service Addresses & Features | Quad9
alr sick ty.
I’ll try this DNS later when I get home