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Site feels slow on first hit, want to know if DNS resolution is part of the blame

DNS owns the first few hundred milliseconds of every cold connection. With dig and a handful of public resolvers you can measure in minutes whether your provider is fast or slow, and whether an Anycast DNS host (Cloudflare, NS1, Route 53) would help.

Try this first

  1. 1Measure from different locations with dig +stats vectel.nl @1.1.1.1 and @8.8.8.8 and @9.9.9.9, look at the Query time.
  2. 2Compare with dig vectel.nl @ns1.yourcurrentdns.nl directly against the authoritative server, that separates resolver latency from authoritative latency.
  3. 3For a user view, use DNSPerf, dnscheck.tools or synthetic monitors at Better Stack/Pingdom with probes in NL, DE, US.
  4. 4Under 30 ms from NL is healthy, over 100 ms from an EU resolver is a signal to migrate or add an Anycast host.
  5. 5Remember resolver cache distorts the measurement, use dig +trace or unique subdomains to bypass it.

When to bring us in

If you see consistently high DNS latency across regions while TTLs are low, an Anycast DNS host or split-zone setup is usually the fix and we can plan it with you.

See also

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