Why We Built DNS4IN
Every time you open an app, visit a website, or send a message, your device makes a DNS query. DNS is the system that translates domain names like "google.com" into IP addresses your device can connect to. It's invisible, it's constant, and it knows everywhere you go online.
For most Indians, these queries travel unencrypted through their ISP's default DNS servers — Jio, Airtel, BSNL, Excitel. Your ISP can see every domain you visit, when you visited it, and how often. That's not a hypothetical risk. It's how the internet works by default.
The privacy-conscious have alternatives — Cloudflare, Google, Quad9. All excellent services. All headquartered outside India. Every DNS query you send to them crosses international borders, subject to foreign jurisdictions and policies you have no say in.
India has 800 million+ internet users. We have world-class software engineers, a booming tech ecosystem, and an ambitious digital infrastructure vision. But we didn't have a single homegrown, privacy-first DNS resolver(while writing this) that Indian citizens could point their devices to and trust.
That's why we built DNS4IN.
What We Believe
Your browsing history belongs to you. DNS4IN stores ZERO logs. Yeah, you heard it right! Not reduced logs, not anonymised logs — ZERO. Every query is processed entirely in memory. When our servers restart, there's nothing to recover, nothing to subpoena, nothing to sell. We couldn't hand over your data even if someone asked, because it doesn't exist.
Encryption should be the default. We support DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS, both using TLS 1.3. Your queries are encrypted end-to-end between your device and our servers. No ISP, no middleman, no coffee shop Wi-Fi sniffer can see what you're resolving.
Threats should be stopped before they reach you. DNS4IN blocks over 130,000 malicious domains — ads, trackers, phishing sites, malware distributors, and cryptojacking scripts. Our blocklists are curated from multiple threat intelligence feeds and updated automatically every day. If a domain is dangerous, we return nothing. Your device never connects. The threat never loads.
Your data should stay in India. Our DNS servers are physically located in Bangalore and Delhi NCR. Your queries are resolved on Indian soil, under Indian jurisdiction. We don't route your traffic through Singapore or Frankfurt or Virginia. The only infrastructure we run outside India is a monitoring server for uptime tracking — it doesn't process DNS queries.
What DNS4IN Looks Like Today
Two production servers — one in Bangalore, one in Delhi NCR — handling DNS resolution with geographic routing. If you're in South India, your queries go to Bangalore. North India, they go to Delhi. This keeps latency low and your data local.
Every query goes through DNSSEC validation, protecting you against DNS spoofing and cache poisoning. We support modern DNS standards including QName Minimization (which limits what upstream servers can see about your queries), serve-stale capability (which keeps DNS working even if upstream servers go down temporarily), and Extended DNS Errors (which tells your browser exactly why a query failed instead of showing a cryptic error).
We built a connection test at test.joindns4.in where you can instantly verify whether you're using DNS4IN, run a speed comparison against other resolvers, check if specific domains are blocked, and even submit whitelist or blacklist requests. A live status dashboard at status.joindns4.in shows real-time uptime for both servers.
Setting up is straightforward — on Android, it's one setting change. On desktop browsers, it's a few clicks. No app to install, no account to create, no payment required.
Why This Matters for India
India's Digital India initiative has connected hundreds of millions of people to the internet for the first time. But connectivity without privacy is surveillance infrastructure. As more of Indian life moves online — banking, healthcare, education, governance — the DNS layer becomes increasingly critical.
When your DNS is controlled by a foreign entity, you're trusting that entity with a complete map of your digital life. That trust may be well-placed today, but it's a dependency that India doesn't need to have.
DNS4IN isn't about nationalism or rejecting global services. Cloudflare and Google run excellent DNS infrastructure. We use some of their services ourselves for specific edge cases. But India should have the option of a homegrown resolver that keeps data local, blocks threats proactively, and answers to Indian users first.
We think DNS privacy is a right, not a premium feature. DNS4IN is free, will remain free, and will never monetise your queries.
What's Ahead
We're expanding. A third server in Kolkata is on our roadmap for late 2026, which will improve coverage for Eastern India. We're working toward supporting newer DNS protocols like DNS-over-QUIC and DNS-over-HTTP/3 for even faster encrypted resolution. A public statistics dashboard showing aggregate query volumes and uptime is in the works.
But the most important thing we can do right now is grow. More users mean more feedback, more edge cases discovered, more domains reported as false positives or missed threats. If you care about DNS privacy, try DNS4IN. If it works for you, tell someone else.
India's internet deserves Indian infrastructure that puts privacy first.
Set up DNS4IN: joindns4.in Test your connection: test.joindns4.in Check our uptime: status.joindns4.in