Why homes need a DNS filter
Home networks are full of devices that cannot protect themselves. Antivirus may run on the family laptop, but not on the smart TV, the printer or the children's game console. Phishing messages reach everyone, from grandparents receiving fake parcel notifications to teenagers receiving fake game giveaways. Malicious adverts appear on otherwise ordinary websites.
A DNS filter on the home router covers all of those devices at once. When anyone in the household clicks a link to a known phishing site or a device tries to reach a malware server, the lookup is refused and nothing loads.
Protecting children online
Parental controls built into individual devices vary widely and must be set up one by one. With DNS filtering you choose categories once on the network: adult content, gambling and social media can each be blocked with a switch. Every device connected to your Wi-Fi follows those rules, including friends' devices when they visit.
Your own allowlist and blocklist let you make exceptions. Allow a homework site that was caught by a category, or block a specific game that is causing arguments. Changes take effect for the whole household immediately.
Recommended settings for families
A sensible starting point for most families looks like this:
- Malware protection: on
- Phishing protection: on
- Newly registered domain blocking: on
- Adult content: on
- Gambling: on
- Social media: depending on the age of your children
Making it harder to bypass
Older children sometimes learn to change DNS settings on their own devices or to use a VPN. You can make bypassing much harder on your router: block outgoing DNS (port 53) to anything other than FirewallDNS, and turn off the option for devices to choose their own DNS where your router allows it. Browser-level encrypted DNS can also skip your filter, so check the settings in the browsers your children use. No technical measure is perfect, so combine these settings with clear household rules.
Quieter smart TVs and gadgets
Smart TVs, streaming sticks and voice assistants contact advertising and telemetry services surprisingly often. The query log makes that traffic visible, and ad and tracker blocking can reduce it. Many families find that seeing this traffic for the first time changes how they think about connected devices in the home.
Setting it up at home
Setup takes a few minutes. Create an account, register your home's public IP address in the dashboard, and change the DNS server setting on your home router to the FirewallDNS addresses. Our guides walk through the most common home routers, including ASUS, TP-Link, NETGEAR, FRITZ!Box, Linksys, Google Nest Wifi and eero.
Many home internet connections have a dynamic IP address that changes from time to time. If your address changes, update it in the dashboard so filtering continues. [VERIFY: automatic dynamic IP updates (DDNS link) are described on the site but are not yet in the dashboard]
Common questions from parents
Parents often ask whether filtering will slow down gaming or streaming. DNS lookups are a tiny part of that traffic and answers are cached, so most families notice no difference. Another common question is whether children will know the filter is there. A blocked site simply fails to load, so it is worth explaining the rules in advance and agreeing on how to ask for an exception. Finally, parents ask whether filtering replaces supervision. It does not, but it removes a great deal of risk in the background while you focus on the conversations that matter.
Protecting older relatives
Grandparents and other older relatives are frequent targets of phishing and scam websites. If you help manage their internet connection, setting up DNS filtering on their router protects them from many fake parcel, bank and tech-support sites without asking them to change how they use the internet.
Working from home
If someone in the household works from home, a company laptop may use its own VPN and DNS settings. That is normal and usually required by the employer. Leave work devices to the employer's IT rules, and let FirewallDNS protect the rest of the home.
Pricing for households
FirewallDNS is priced at $2.90 per device per month. The Starter package covers 5 devices for $14.50 per month. Count the devices on your network that you want to protect when choosing a package.