DNS is the short for domain name server. This is an area where many people don’t want to tinker with. But to get the best results, it’s recommended to change your DNS servers from the default ones. The default DNS is the one that is set by your ISP (internet service provider). Many users have stopped using their ISP’s DNS servers after discovering that they are slow and unreliable.
Inferior DNS not only can slow down your internet connection speed but it can also cause censorship issues. Sometimes it can also cause connection issues. Therefore, don’t suffer from slow and error-prone DNS servers. It’s time to change your DNS, now.
But we need to choose DNS provider wisely. The two post popular DNS providers are OpenDNS and Google Public DNS. There are many more DNS providers and you can choose any one of them. Here’s one example, a user in the US should not pick a UK DNS provider and vice versa.
DNS Benchmark to Test Speed of DNS Servers
Here’s a free and portable software for Windows named as DNS Benchmark. This application gives you exact performance of local and remote DNS nameservers. DNS Benchmark will give you visibility into what’s going on with your system’s currently assigned DNS servers by automatically comparing their performance with many other well known publicly available alternatives. The program already has many pre-added servers, some of them are very popular. And that’s not all. You don’t need to rely just on pre-added servers, you can add other domain name servers also. There’s a handy “Add/remove” button for this task.
You would be surprised to know the size of this utility. It’s just 164 KB. This is really a small useful utility to benchmark speed and performance of various DNS providers.
Click on Run Benchmark to start the benchmark process. During my tests, it took 5 minutes to complete the process. Have some patience and let this test complete. You will be able to know the name, owner, status and response time of DNS.
The view can also be changed to “Tabular View”, which is not meant for average user. This view will show cached name, uncached name and dotcom lookup. And finally, don’t forget to check out the “Conclusions” tab. It can give you some very informative insights on how good your current DNS is and what can you do to solve those issues.
Go ahead and try out this freeware and portable program. It can also be carried on your USB flash drive. Test speed, reliability and performance of DNS using this awesome little freebie.
Download DNS Benchmark from here.
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