20 Public DNS Servers Compilation List

Domain Name Service (DNS) is an Internet service that maps IP addresses and fully qualified domain names (FQDN) to one another. In this way, DNS alleviates the need to remember IP addresses.

Computers that run DNS are called name servers. Ubuntu ships with BIND (Berkley Internet Naming Daemon), the most common program used for maintaining a name server on Linux.

A DNS server acts a lot like the address book on your phone. When you want to call somebody, you can manually enter their number, but remembering everyone’s numbers is a huge hassle. It’s so much easier to add their number in the phone’s memory and associate a name with it – such as “Mark” – so that when you want to call Mark, you find his name on the list and hit call.

The same goes for your computer. It doesn’t know what a “Google” or a “Facebook” or a “Twitter” is. It does, however, know what an IP address is. When you enter a website such as “www.facebook.com,” your computer figures that this is a URL and goes to its address book of URLs to figure out where Facebook is on the network. This is what the DNS server does – it acts as an address book for URLs.

Flush DNS Cache

If you’re visiting the same page a lot, it makes sense for the computer to remember the addresses for URLs so it doesn’t have to page the DNS server every time. This storage of remembered URLs is called the DNS cache. Sometimes your machine will rely on this to resolve a URL, but if this cache is corrupted, it will return an error.

Flushing the DNS cache in Windows is very easy. To start, press the Win key and start typing cmd. When command prompt appears in the search results, right click on it, and select “run as administrator.” This brings up an elevated command prompt window which can accept system-level changes.

To flush the DNS cache in Windows, enter this command:

Command: ipconfig /flushdns

For Linux OS, open the terminal and type the following command:

Command: /etc/init.d/nscd restart

If the above doesn’t work, then the ideal solution is to change the server you’re using. Perhaps the server you use by default has gone down so you can’t resolve URLs. You can change your adapter settings to use the below DNS servers instead of your default one.

Here we’ve listed out top 20 public DNS provider addresses which you can easily use in your Windows/Linux or Mac machine to speed up your internet speed.

Google

Comodo Secure DNS

FreeDNS

Alternate DNS

Dyn

DNS.WATCH

Cloudflare

GreenTeamDNS

Norton ConnectSafe

Hurricane Electric

Level3

Neustar Security

OpenNIC

OpenDNS Home

Quad9

Yandex.DNS

SafeDNS

puntCAT

Verisign

UncensoredDNS

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