DNS servers.

[Greenbell7]

After Cloudflare went down, I've been thinking that maybe I should not have my network using just one DNS provider. Is it a good idea to have two separate DNS providers for my router, and am I worrying about things that I shouldn't?

[benny001]

Having two DNS providers is always a good idea. Personally, I have my primary set to 1.1.1.1 and fail over set to Google's 8.8.8.8.

[Allterax]

Personally I have my own dns server with quad9 for fallback but if you dont have the means to host your own dns then yes you should use a main and fallback like quad9 or google dns or cloudflare

[Eigenvektor]

Yes, redundancy is always a good idea for pretty much anything in IT. And since it doesn't cost you anything and/or require a lot of effort to set up, there's no reason not to.

 

If you're fine with a little setup time and cost, you could even set up a Pi-hole as a caching DNS server in-home with an external DNS as fallback.

 

Of course that's doesn't really help you if Cloudflare is down. Sites using it as a reverse proxy will be unreachable regardless of whether you can resolve their IP or not.

[Falcon1986]

@Greenbell7

 

I agree with PiHole or AdGuard. You can specify multiple external DNS addresses and how they are used. In AdGuard Home, for example, I use parallel requests and the fastest servers tend to be used.

 

If you want something managed in the cloud instead of locally, you can install PiHole or AdGuard there as well and point your router to the DNS server’s IP. Alternatively, there’s NextDNS and AdGuard DNS but you might need a static WAN IP, IIRC.