I chose privacy over speed with my DNS and don’t regret the trade-off
I chose privacy over speed with my DNS and don’t regret the trade-off
https://www.makeuseof.com/i-chose-privacy-over-speed-with-my-dns-and-dont-regret-the-trade-off/
Publish Date: 2026-07-14 14:30:00
Source Domain: www.makeuseof.com
I’ve been using encrypted DNS for a while because I prefer keeping my ordinary DNS requests away from the prying eyes of my ISP. I always assumed it was slowing down my queries, but I’d never actually measured it properly.
Rather than waste precious milliseconds on a browser-based DNS speed test, I wrote my own PowerShell script that ran uncached lookups and recorded the results with a good level of accuracy.
That little moment of curiosity quickly turned into a comparison between my ISP’s automatic DNS, Cloudflare over HTTPS, and Mullvad over HTTPS, with a sprinkle of Wireshark packet analysis for good measure.
My ISP was (unsurprisingly) the fastest. Cloudflare was slower, but absolutely usable. Mullvad averaged more than a second because it kept routing my Australian connection through London. In the end, I still chose privacy, but it was clear that routing played a significant role in the overall DNS speed test results.
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I benchmarked Quad9, NextDNS, and Cloudflare, and the winner wasn’t the big name
Multiple testing locations and it still wasn’t completely clear.
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