I have switched to using my Chromebook for downloading stuff since it's hard to get viruses or malware on it.

All my Windows and Mac computers have been switched to 8.8.8.8 over time and Mega works fine on them, but I noticed Mega would either time out or it would say that the link was invalid (Mega...not the browser) when using the Chromebook.

So on a hunch after AT&T has done such wonderful things like block Netflix emails and Apple services, I switched to 8.8.8.8 for DNS and immediately Mega worked again.


So watch out for the ISP's having passive ways of blocking things they don't like.

I find OpenDNS is fastest for me, over my ISP and over GoogleDNS.
https://www.opendns.com/

With OpenDNS, creating an account, you can implant your own rules of things to block.
Like gambling sites, drugs, hate crime sites, etc. They got a lot of categories.
But, if you surf public torrent sites, you'll likely get blocked for "drug" or "gambling" or even "ad/spam" related blocking rules.
Public sites all depend on advertisements injected into their site to run for free. Those ads are sometimes targeted and listed for drugs, gambling or just plain spam from a collected database of uses reporting them (not the torrent necessarily, but just the ads themselves since they circulate over thousands of free and cheap websites).

I recommend http://wiki.opennicproject.org/HomePage over google or opendns, the two others can be fallback
Or a router that does its own dns
opennic doesn't log on some servers

Edit: here is how to test the speed
https://code.google.com/p/namebench/

Because Google Code is not extinct, it doesn't seem like they announced they would move to SourceForge or, better, GitHub.
however, searching for namebench, there is a "2.0" in the works at GitHub.
https://github.com/google/namebench

Not as stable and development seems slow.

Doesn't really seem like much has changed in terms of DNS technology since 2010/2011.

An alternative DNS benchmark would here:
https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

Download, run, and take the time to create a dynamic list of fastest DNS servers.
Works accurately if you have network card set to "automatic" rather than letting something handle your DNS.