How to Use Cloudflare DNS on Mac OS for Speed & Privacy

How to Use Cloudflare DNS on Mac OS for Speed & Privacy

CloudFlare now has a consumer DNS service that is very fast and also centered around privacy. CloudFlare DNS says they wont log IP addresses or sell your data, which in the modern era is perhaps more important than ever for users who value the vague concept of internet privacy. This article will show you how to setup and use CloudFlare DNS on a Mac. For some quick background, DNS is what links an IP address to an easy to read domain name, and its sort of like an internet directory service. The faster the DNS requests are, the faster your general internet performance will be because there is less time spent performing lookups to associate an IP address to a domain name. No, it wont increase the actual transfer speeds, but using faster DNS may increase the response time of accessing various internet services and websites. But as mentioned above, its not just speed that makes Cloudflare DNS enticing, its the privacy-centric nature of the service, if youre interested in learning more you can read more . If youre already familiar with then this process should be familiar to you, the main difference then is the addition of the Cloudflare DNS IP of 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. Here are the full steps: When you apply the network setting changes your internet connection will likely temporarily disconnect and reconnect again. You should not need to quit and relaunch any networking apps for the change to take effect, but to be thorough you may want to anyway. Or you can reboot your computer. Likewise it shouldnt be necessary to flush DNS caches but youre welcome to clear DNS cache anyway, you can learn how to , , El Capitan, and other Mac OS X versions if need be. If you have multiple Macs and decide you want to use CloudFlare DNS on all of them, youll want to repeat the same setup process on each of them, and you could also if you want to set those to use the service as well. This is a great question, since every user and every ISP will likely have different performance for different DNS providers. Fortunately there are multiple ways to check DNS performance: If you want to run a DNS comparison speed test yourself from your own Mac, and youre savvy with the command line, you can save (via ) to your local directory, and then run the following command: In each of my own personal tests, Cloudflare DNS was the fastest, but individual per location, ISP, and other variables. If this interests you then try it out yourself and see if its faster for you, but even if its not, some people may opt to use CloudFlare DNS for the purported privacy benefit. Thats a personal decision, so whether you want to use CloudFlare DNS, your ISP provided DNS, or any other DNS, thats your call!