Quad9 – A public and free DNS service for a better security and privacy
27 comments
·March 25, 2025bustling-noose
The quality of dns always makes or breaks your internet experience. Personally at home unbound on opnsense with some blocking list has always worked really well for me. Openwrt with pihole also works fine. But the moment I have to use some recursive dns like this, I tend to not enjoy the experience.
udev4096
It really depends. Cloudflare, quad9 or whatever upstream DNS probably has huge cache which makes resolving the queries quite fast. Although, local caching, like with unbound, is still going to be a lot better than any upstream resolver
SparkyMcUnicorn
opnsense + ctrld[0] + unbound works great and automatically upgrades upstream requests to DoH (etc.)
Was using NextDNS for a while, but stability and performance was a common issue. I like the idea of something like pihole, but ControlD is good, works anywhere, and is easy to manage.
[0] https://github.com/Control-D-Inc/ctrld/wiki/pfSense-and-OPNs...
eudhxhdhsb32
Are you just referring to ads not being blocked?
A regular dns like quad9 + ublock origin on Firefox has been a consistently great experience for me.
bayindirh
Probably the responsiveness of things. Firefox is very sensitive to DNS roundtrip time during daily use. A faster response time provides much better experience with it.
I guess that ~25% of "Firefox is slow" myth is coming from slow DNS response, if not higher.
eudhxhdhsb32
That makes sense. Do you know the reason for Firefox being more sensitive? Is their DNS prefetching not as effective?
buyucu
does PiHole cache dns queries and deliver them faster?
1in1010
I've been trying nextdns.io out on my home router. So far its been pretty good. Just about two weeks in now.
drcongo
I've been using NextDNS without issue for several years now, I love it.
cess11
How censored are Quad9? I find it annoying when DNS providers try to cut me off from foreign news services so if I were to switch I'd like to know that they won't.
janandonly
There is some references to known threads. But nonspecific list on their website that I can find.
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tomzin0
[flagged]
vollbrecht
So they provide full information on what happened, with all legal papers attached at the end, and a link to a site that gives you a list of all "blocked sites" that where effected by that order.
While the outcome is quite unfortunate, the way they provide all info here seams like a plus in my book here.
If a state/entity comes after your org tomorrow, and you got to either fight legally or leave the market (like cisco in the story), what would you do?
ratorx
The French legislation is targeting all major resolvers, Quad9 is not really any better or worse than others just for this.
A niche resolver may get away under the radar, but only because they were not targeted.
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fuzzy2
So then what do you use or recommend instead?
udev4096
Mullvad [1], dns.watch, dnscrypt [2]
1 - https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
accrual
I use a combination of 1.1.1.1, 9.9.9.11, and OpenDNS over DNSSEC via Pihole. Not sure if it's a "good" strategy, though.
ratorx
I think the France legislation is aimed at most major resolvers. You might get away with more niche ones for now, but the only stable way is to self-host a recursive resolver (like unbound) that walk the DNS tree themselves.
prmoustache
Host your own dns resolver. It isn't hard.
udev4096
Hosting is never hard. It's about maintainability. How do you handle HA? How will you expose the service? What about backups? How efficiently are you running it? That's just the tip of the iceberg. For an average joe, this is not something they wanna deal with
I have been using 9.9.9.9.9 for more than 5 years and this DNS has never failed me unlike Cloudflare.