Recently, I’ve struggled to find a good DNS over HTTPS service. It all begins when I feel my ISP is also hijacking the query, especially when using a public DNS resolvers service such as Google DNS, Cloudflare, or maybe some others. I’ve several guesses on how they do it, but that’s just a guess and not something proven. When I tried to access some web which I feel wrongfully blocked such as Reddit, my browser immediately redirected to their blocking page even when I use Google DNS. Thus it began, my journey to find a good DNS over HTTPS service.
It began with a simple search “DNS over HTTPS list” on Google and one of the first results immediately caught my attention. It’s a community-maintained list on Github under the Curl repository. It’s a long list and it makes me in awe. It is also surprising that Indonesia also has one, although its description is just “based in Indonesia” without any further explanation such as using DNSSec, no logging, etc. very classic! Since the list is long, you may try it yourself 😅.
But, some features are truly worth praising more. First are typosquatting and IDN homograph protection because of silly reasons: my fat thumbs and a rather low-accuracy typing when using a physical keyboard, especially when I’m tired in the afternoon.
The second is cryptojacking protection because I don’t want my PC resources unknowingly used by some crypto-mining malware that is really popular nowadays. Yeah, today is more profitable to use the victim’s PC as a crypto slave miner rather than using it for a DDOS bot.
NextDNS free-tier is also very generous. They give us free 300,000 DNS queries a month. From my experience, this amount of DNS queries is sufficient to be used personally up to two devices, my PC and my phone. Usually, I ended up using between 250,000 to 270,000 DNS queries a month.
The PRO-plan is also reasonably cheap in my opinion. I guess, when I ready to implement it to my home WiFi to protect the entire family, I should subscribe to PRO.
