What is the DNS unblocking service?

Is it legal to use smart DNS?

Do I need to be concerned that my DNS will have a false DNS hit when queried?

It is not illegal to use smart DNS, and there are some good reasons to do it, but many reasons against. There is the risk of being blacklisted, where a DDoS attack on your server results in a temporary ban from your providers' DDoS protection service. There is also the risk of causing your ISP to block you, or your router to fail, which can be devastating to a small business.

Smart DNS is also difficult to maintain, because most software has a bad habit of trying to fix a broken configuration file. This means a lot of hassle when you have to maintain two DNS servers. In the old days (and even now with Windows), you would need to run a command-line utility every time you turned on the computer. In modern systems, this can be automated; however, the scripts are often buggy, slow, or just plain not working, and they don't always work in the same way on different operating systems or systems with different software installed.

That said, some providers offer DNS services that are more resilient to attacks and are easier to maintain. If you're planning to start a business, I highly recommend that you talk to your ISP about getting a secondary DNS server with better protection and support.

I recommend these two articles on Wikipedia to get you started on DNS issues.

What is the DNS unblocking service?

This service was designed to allow customers, parents and educators the ability to access sites that are blocked in their countries.

It is a DNS unblocking service that will look up domain names and if it sees they are blocked then it will replace the blocked domain name with a generic message instead of a specific blocking message. The blocking messages that are in use are in several different languages and will be displayed based on where the user is accessing from. Please visit our support pages for more information:

Who can use the DNS unblocking service? Any one who wants to be able to access sites blocked in their country by their ISPs or government can use this service. In order to access sites that are blocked in your country by the ISP you will need to know the IP address (Internet Protocol) of the specific site. These addresses are published by website owners and are available from our DNS lookup database.

Is it safe to use this service? Yes. We guarantee that you will be able to access the sites you want using this service. In addition we do not log your details. Our data security is very important to us and will never be put at risk.

How does it work? Using the service all you need to do is enter the site you want to view. There are no steps to go through in order to use the service. Just enter the address you want to view, click go and wait for the site to load.

What do I get when I use the service? When you access a site via the service you will be able to see the site exactly as it is published by the website owners. We are unable to override the blocking messages that your ISP has put in place so you will only be shown the specific blocking message for that country.

Will the sites I view be blocked by my own ISP or the blocking message still apply? This service will override the blocking messages that your ISP has set up. This means that the same site that you will view will not be blocked as the service will hide that from you. However it would still be blocked if you were to access the site using your local ISP.

Can this service be used to get around geographic blocks? No. This service will always show you a copy of the website regardless of how it has been blocked or not.

Can DNS unblock sites?

One of the most popular questions I get asked is can I unblock sites, which is a very relevant question since there is a legitimate argument to be made that you can just install DNS blockers like NoScript or uBlock Origin to allow you to use websites without visiting them.

What Is DNS Blocking? Before we can answer the question of whether DNS blocking can unblock sites, we need to establish some important things. Most people probably already know what DNS blocking is, but here's a simple explanation: DNS blocking is when DNS requests are being sent to an alternate DNS address which returns a custom error page, for example: This may sound familiar, because that error page has been used as a technique in attacks. For example, a popular DNS attack used to be called DNS Tunneling.

How Do DNS Blockers Work? As mentioned above, the most basic definition of DNS blocking is when your browser sends a DNS request to a specific DNS address and is returned a custom error page. The problem is, this is a bit problematic because the first website you visit after installing a DNS blocker may have a DNS setup to make it look like they are a legitimate domain, which is why your initial experience with blocking DNS can be so poor. For example, I tested a DNS blocker on a brand new clean PC and the first website I visited was not blocked. I just couldn't understand why the website would load if I hadn't even tried it out before.

Why Don't I Get Any Pop-Ups From The Websites I Visit? To be honest, when you start to experience a site you didn't initially encounter, it can be really frustrating. It doesn't make any sense, so the feeling of failure can be overwhelming.

After experiencing one or two web pages without a pop-up, it's easy to think you have completely gotten rid of all pop-ups from the internet. However, when it comes to DNS blocking, you might get a lot more pop-ups than normal because of the issue I mentioned earlier.

When your browser sends a DNS request to google.com (just like you would for the normal Google website), this is typically where DNS blocking would come into play. This makes me curious; why does google.com load?