The Sundarban
Revealed Apr 10, 2026, 5:01 PM EDT
Oliver been writing about mobile wider expertise space for more than a decade with bylines on TechRadar, CNET, Inverse, and many more.
With ride preserving breaking information, writing in-depth product evaluations, and sharing more than a few opinions, Oliver has been the roam-to knowledgeable for some of the greatest publications both online and in print.
In case you are reading this, there’s a fair chance that your internet’s working. You’re probably the train of the modem that came along with your internet package. Maybe you have added your contain router to the mix. Nevertheless there’s one change that has the energy to revolutionize your home network and the entire lot you connect to it. And as is so incessantly the case with these issues, or now not it’s DNS. It be always DNS.
Normally, all of your devices, from phones to laptop techniques to smart home accessories, train the DNS servers supplied by your internet service provider (ISP). Alternatively, you can settle to make train of DNS servers from other companies. Google and Cloudflare are some of the more popular options, and they are incessantly faster and more reliable than the servers offered by your ISP.
Nevertheless I wanted even more control and even better performance, so I rolled my contain. These days, my home network runs on two Pi-gap DNS servers powered by virtualized Ubuntu machines. And now I’ve tasted the advantages, I am going to by no means roam back to the train of anyone else’s servers.
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My network demands the only
No such thing as too fast
I suspect that my home network is busier than most. And as someone who works from home, I want it to be able to depend on it. Hardware-smart, a mesh gadget powered by Netgear’s 970-sequence Wi-Fi 7 Orbi access features is more than up to the task. It be incredibly fast, and with three access features, even a conceal-and-sight champion would be hard-pushed to hunt down somewhere now not bathed in attractive Wi-Fi. I am covered on that front.
Nevertheless every machine connected to that Orbi gadget restful wants to know what to enact at any time when it wants to reach a webpage or online service. And we have a ton of devices.
Between my better half and me, there are two iPhones and two Apple Watches, as smartly as my MacBook Pro, that are almost always at home. Plus, we gain all of our TV online, so there’s Apple TV doing its thing. Our youngest goes to an online college, so his laptop is connected, too. Oh, and his iPad in the direction of breaks. When night comes, there’s a gaming PC, another iPhone, and a third Apple Watch added to the mix courtesy of my oldest son. We haven’t even mentioned all the smart bulbs, speakers, cameras, and other devices that suitable whir away, doing their thing.
All of right here’s to say that my home network is busy, and it only ever quietens down once we’re all asleep. Even then, laptop techniques are backing up, and updates are downloaded, so the network is rarely unused. With so worthy going on, I wanted to be certain that the ride was as performant as imaginable, which introduced me to Pi-gap.
More control over how devices train my network
It be always DNS
Pi-gap, as the name suggests, was originally designed as a mild-weight DNS server that may probably race on low-powered Raspberry Pi devices. Nevertheless the reality is that it can be installed on almost anything. Whatever you install it on, you are going to gain a DNS server alongside other optional features, together with a handy DHCP server.
You gain a few issues by bringing your DNS server literally in-home. One of those is escape, because or now not it’s faster on your devices to make a DNS quiz to a local machine than one that’s somewhere on the internet. Nevertheless the escape also comes from caching, and or now not it’s this aspect that really changes the game.
Any time a machine tries to connect to a web page, it first makes a DNS quiz. Nevertheless with a Pi-gap server, the IP address it returns by way of a response is cached for future train. The next time another quiz for the same web page is made, Pi-gap already is aware of which IP address to ship back. Any DNS entries returned from Pi-gap’s cache enact so incredibly quickly. We’re talking a few microseconds rather than tens or maybe a entire bunch of milliseconds.
While that couldn’t sound like a lot of time, the real advantages are display in the aggregate. You may very smartly be surprised by how many DNS queries your devices make each day. Take all of these requests into consideration, and those milliseconds soon add up to real time savings.
There are other advantages to web page hosting your contain DNS server, too. As the parent of one teenager and one soon-to-be-teen, I gain pleasure from having express control over which DNS queries are returned, and which aren’t. By blockading a particular DNS quiz, you can successfully make a web page or an entire app inaccessible. It’s easy to gawk the place that may very smartly be beneficial.
The same approach can also be mature to dam ads. In case you understand which servers provide a web page’s ads, you can block the DNS quiz for those servers. If a machine can’t access the server that hosts the ad, it can’t load it. Clear, it may very smartly be like the train of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, however it unquestionably works. More importantly, it works for every machine on my home network with out any additional configuration on my part.
There’s also an important privacy aspect that mustn’t be lost sight of right here. With a home beefy of smart home accessories and a career that involves new ones arriving all the time, I like vivid what they gain up to.
We have now all heard scare stories of cheap internet-connected devices sending data to random servers.
