SolveDNS is a leading DNS testing and analytics tool. We collect a lot of anonymous data about DNS and name servers. For the reference of our users, this report analyzes the speed of the major managed DNS providers across the world in terms of their DNS lookup speed. You would be surprised to know that there are several DNS services that offer speeds of below 10 ms! We are here to introduce to you these fastest DNS services so that you can make informed decisions on which DNS service to use for your domain names. Click here for the current report. The report refreshes at the beginning of every month. So, this month, you can view the last month's report (and all the months prior to the last month). Where do you measure from? Starting January 2015, we measure from Europe, Asia and North America (Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam and Singapore). The report will display the dns speed from all the seven cities including an average. How do we collect the data? Every month, there are thousands of users that use SolveDNS as their DNS testing tool. This results in several million DNS queries. Each DNS query is timed and logged. At the end of the month, we analyze the data and generate a report which includes the rankings of the top DNS providers in terms of their DNS Query speed in milliseconds. The report includes the average speed, the minimum speed and the maximum speed across all name servers of the DNS provider. The rankings also include the standard deviation (SD) and the 95% confidence interval around the mean. What is the 95% confidence interval? A confidence interval around the mean give an idea about the variability of the estimate. A 95% confidence interval states that if we were to collect the data from the population 100 times, 95% of the times the estimate (the average) will lie in the interval. So the standard deviation is the most important part in calculating the confidence interval. How do we calculate speed? The speed is the DNS lookup speed only, and does not include the name resolution speed. The time it takes to resolve a name server's name to its IP address is not included in the speed calculation. This gives an accurate representation of the duration it takes for the request to go to the name server and the name server responds with the answer. The maximum duration is 1 second after which our lookup times out. So if a name server times out, it took 1 second for the dns lookup. What about network problems with SolveDNS? We first query the root name server. The root name server is the first name server which any recursor queries to get an answer about a TLD or a domain name. The root name server then redirects us to another name server called the TLD server. The TLD server generally knows about the authoritative name servers of a domain name. In our data collection, a name server times out only if the root name server and the TLD server successfully responded within 500 ms. If they do not, we just ignore all queries after that. This removes spurious timeouts which might negatively impact the speed calculations just because we were having network problems. What if I want the current month's report? The current month's report will be generated at the beginning of the next month. Once we have enough volume of DNS lookups, we will display the current month's data in real time. What about uptime? Uptime is a very sensitive topic, and we take it very seriously in our calculations. This report is only a speed comparison report. If you want the uptime of your name servers, please use the name server analytics page which displays uptime and success rate per name server. Here is an example. Which DNS providers are the fastest across all months? We have found that the top 3 fastest DNS lookups happen on name servers of CloudFlare, Dyn and DNS Made Easy. This could change every month, so keep a lookout on the report for each month and notice the changes in the speed in milliseconds that it takes for a provider to respond to DNS queries. What about reports before June 2012? We started the data collection in June 2012, so reports before that are not available. How do I add my DNS service to your reports? If you have been in business for a long time and if we have enough volume of DNS lookups for your service, we will be happy to add your service to our report. Please use the email address in the footer and send us your service name, your name servers and your website. We are always on the lookout of new services which we can introduce to our visitors. What if I don't agree with the speed calculations? If you think that the numbers on the report do not reflect your service accurately, send us an email with a list of all of your name servers and we will definitely look into it. What if I have a question on your methods? Don't hesitate at all in sending us an email. Use the email address in the footer. You can also talk to us on Twitter @SolveDNS.