About Bancuh DNS
Bancuh DNS is a free, public adblock DNS service. It’s a personal project run by Ragib, a software engineer in Malaysia, with a lot of help from the people who use it.
How it’s paid for
Section titled “How it’s paid for”The servers are paid for out of pocket. There are no ads, no paid tier, and no selling or sharing of data. Your lookups are kept for 10 minutes, visible only to you, and then deleted.
Because it’s run by one person, there’s no uptime guarantee. Every server is health-checked around the clock, and outages raise an alert. Check the status page if something seems wrong.
The name
Section titled “The name”Bancuh is Malay for to mix, as in stirring up a drink. It began as a spare domain name, until users started calling the service “Bancuh DNS” and the name stuck. It fits: the blocklist is a mix of dozens of others.
How it got here
Section titled “How it got here”| Year | |
|---|---|
| 2015 | Started on a Raspberry Pi at home, to block ads on the family’s phones. Moved to two rented servers after one too many power cuts, and offered to anyone through a series of blog posts. |
| 2017 | The code published on GitHub. |
| 2018 | The first thank-you from a stranger arrives as a GitHub issue. |
| 2020 | Servers added in Paris and Tokyo. SafeSearch enforcement added at users’ request. |
| 2021 | The servers stop forwarding lookups to public resolvers, and resolve them themselves. |
| 2022 | DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS on every server, using dnsdist. |
| 2023 | The DNS server rewritten from scratch in Rust, using a fraction of the memory. For a few months, it forwarded lookups to public resolvers again. |
| 2024 | Each server resolves lookups itself again. A server added in Dallas. |
| 2026 | The resolver moves to Unbound, and this website is rebuilt. |
The longer story, starting with the Raspberry Pi, is on ragib.dev.
The people behind it
Section titled “The people behind it”Much of the blocklist was chosen and tuned by users, above all Tomatoide. Many others have reported broken sites, suggested lists, and tested new servers and features in GitHub issues. Thank you.
Open source
Section titled “Open source”Everything that runs Bancuh DNS is open source, with the DNS software under the MIT licence, and you can run your own copy.
Get in touch
Section titled “Get in touch”Questions, broken sites and suggestions all go to GitHub issues.