Almost everyone uses a “recursive DNS resolver“ provided by their ISP, or one of the big ones from Google/Cloudflare/Cisco. The recursive resolver does all the

Almost everyone uses a “recursive DNS resolver“ provided by their ISP, or one of the big ones from Google/Cloudflare/Cisco. The recursive resolver does all the hard work of resolving the root, top-leevl-domain, the apex domain, the subdomain, any CNAMEs, and finally find the right IP addresses to respond to the DNS client. Recursive resolvers benefit a lot from caching responses at each stage of the chain, the same way your browser/OS/router DNS client benefit from caching the final responses from the recursive resolvers. If you run a full DNS resolver, you have do to all of these steps locally.