The DNS0.EU non-profit public DNS service focused on European users announced its immediate shut down due to time and resource constraints.

Based in France, the service was built as a resilient infrastructure across several hosting providers in every member state of the European Union.

The team behind DNS0.EU replaced all content on the website with a short announcement informing that they discontinued the service.

"The dns0.eu service has been discontinued. We would have liked to keep it running, but it was not sustainable for us in terms of time and resources," the DNS0.EU operator said.

Available alternatives

The team thanked infrastructure and security partners, and recommended that people switch to DNS4EU, a privacy-focused resolver developed by ENISA, or NextDNS, whose founders helped create DNS0.EU.

A DNS resolver translates the human-readable domain names into the numerical, machine-readable IP addresses so browsers can load the correct internet resources.

By default, connected devices use the DNS service from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) but they can choose other options, like Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google (8.8.8.8), or OpenDNS (208.67.222.222).

DNS0.eu was a public recursive DNS resolver service launched in 2023 as a French-based non-profit organization. It promised no-logs functionality, end-to-end encryption for resistance to eavesdropping and tampering, as well as protection against malicious domains, be they phishing domains, or command-and-control (C2)  malware servers.

It offered a free, secure, and GDPR-compliant DNS resolver that supported DNS‑over‑HTTPS, DNS‑over‑TLS, DNS-over-QUIC, and DNS‑over‑HTTP/3. It operated 62 servers in 27 cities in all EU member states, boasting a median latency of 12 milliseconds.

In addition, DNS0.EU provided child safety-focused filters for adult content, piracy, and ads, as well as increased detection of potentially malicious domains by looking into typosquatting, domain parking patterns, TLD reputation, homograph domains, and DGA-created URLs.

DNS0.EU team's recommendations for users, DNS4EU and NextDNS also include protection features against fraudulent and malicious content. However, NextDNS provides more granular filtering for websites and apps through privacy, security, and parental control options.

DNS4EU, co-funded by the European Union, is easier to set up and offers IP resolution that can block access to websites with fraudulent or malicious content, protect against content that is explicit or inappropriate for children, and stop ads.

BleepingComputer has contacted DNS0.EU to learn more about the reasons behind the shut down of the service, and we will update this post when we hear back.