Public DNS servers such as those offered by Google and Cloudflare are often much faster than those offered by your ISP, and they can filter out harmful links. DNS settingsĮven if you’re not worried about slow web pages or being targeted by cybercriminals, you may want to update your DNS settings. This is known as ‘DNS poisoning’ and is very dangerous : if, for instance, you typed in the website address of your bank, a hacker could redirect you instead to a copycat ‘ phishing’ website. This can cause web pages to load slowly, or sometimes not all.īad actors like hackers will sometimes target your DNS cache. Perhaps the website in question has updated its IP address or maybe they’ve added a new server to which you can connect even faster. Problems occur when things start to go stale. Many modern devices and operating systems store the IP addresses of the sites you visit in a special DNS cache to help you access them faster in future. Each time you type a new web address into your browser’s address bar, your device connects to a DNS Server to translate its simple human-readable name into a machine-readable IP address, so you can connect to your web server of choice.

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