Global DNS Latency Report: Benchmarking 891 Hosting Providers

The First Millisecond Matters

Before a browser can download a single byte of your website, it must first answer a simple question: 'Where does this domain live?' This process, known as DNS Resolution, is the often-overlooked starting gun of the web performance race.

At WPTR.net, we believe that you can't improve what you don't measure. As part of our comprehensive Triple-Audit, we dissected the Time to First Byte (TTFB) of 891 hosting providers to isolate their DNS performance.

The Methodology: 10% Trimmed Mean

Data Collection Period: January 1, 2026 – January 14, 2026.

To ensure academic validity and remove statistical noise, we applied a 10% Trimmed Mean method. This involves excluding the fastest 10% (often cached/lucky hits) and the slowest 10% (timeouts/errors) of the dataset.

By removing these outliers, we calculate a 'clean' average that represents the true experience for the majority of users, rather than being skewed by extreme values.

For example, in a country with 50 providers, we discard the top 5 (fastest) and bottom 5 (slowest) results before calculating the average.

Key Findings

Geographic Breakdown

Location plays a critical role in latency. Here is a snapshot of the trimmed averages by country, measured from our reference point:

The Extremes (Excluded from Average)

Even though we excluded them from the main average, the gap between the extremes illustrates the infrastructure variance:

• The Fastest: 1Gb.ru recorded an astonishing 1ms DNS time. This suggests highly optimized local caching or an Anycast DNS network with a node physically adjacent to our test location.
• The Slowest: UCloud lagged significantly with a resolution time of 3496ms. A delay of over 3 seconds just to find the server is catastrophic.

Why Does DNS Latency Variate?

Our analysis suggests three primary factors influencing these scores:

1. Anycast DNS Networks: Providers using Cloudflare or premium DNS services (like AWS Route53) consistently score under 30ms.
2. Legacy Nameservers: Smaller providers hosting their own DNS on a single, overloaded server often show spikes between 100ms-500ms.
3. Network Peering: The physical quality of the network route between the ISP and the datacenter plays a crucial role.

Conclusion

If your website feels 'sluggish' despite having optimized images and code, the culprit might be your nameservers. A 61ms delay is the industry standard; anything over 200ms puts you at a significant disadvantage.

Check your own provider's DNS performance in our Hosting Directory.