Protecting your home or business network from security threats and inappropriate material is crucial, there are many providers of these services but NextDNS is now our service of choice.

NextDNS provide a really powerful set of features well above the usual content filtering, not only can you block websites containing adult material, violence, gambling, and sites mainly used for distributing copyrighted material, but you are also able to block adverts as well as blocking trackers.

Blocklists using the most popular lists available can be enabled to block ads and trackers, preventing these from accessing your browser session. The parental controls can be set up not only to block categories of websites, but restrict access to specific websites, apps, and games with a single click, want to block Fortnite or Minecraft? simple that’s just one click away.

The security settings are fantastic, cryptojacking can be enabled preventing the unauthorised use of your devices to mine cryptocurrency, along with

• Google Safe Browsing
• DNS Rebinding Protection
• IDN Homograph Attacks Protection
• Typosquatting Protection
• Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) Protection
• Block Newly Registered Domains (NRDs)
• Block Parked Domains
• Block Top-Level Domains (TLDs)

Allow lists can be set up to always allow URLs to be accessible, and deny lists can be set up to explicitly block content that’s slipped through the net.

Analytics provides a fantastic overview covering total quires and the total queries blocked resolved domains, and blocked domains, along with the main reason that content was blocked, a really nice overview called “GAFAM Dominance” or Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft shows the percentage of queries against these companies, along with a map of the world highlighting the quires against them, which is really nice.

What’s really good about NextDNS is that you’re able to select the storage location of your log files, should you choose to enable them, currently the options are The USA, The UK, The EU, or Switzerland.

Setting Up

NextDNS allows for setting up DNS over HTTPS and also DNS over TLS/QUIC and scripts are available to install on routers making the process simple, to install on UnifiOS devices it’s just a case of SSHing into your box and running the command below.

sh -c 'sh -c "$(curl -sL https://nextdns.io/install)"'

Oh and on top of all that, it’s free for 300,000 DNS queries per month. subscribing to unlimited quires is just £1.79 per month! you could subscribe to this for a year and it would still be cheaper than purchasing a Raspberry pie and configuring Pi-hole.

Simply put, NextDNS is fantastic, their tagline of “The new firewall for the modern Internet.” couldn’t be more spot-on, you can find out more about them at https://nextdns.io/