FAQ

How it works?

Every device that accesses the Internet does so with an Internet (IP) address. An IP address is like a phone number for computers, so they know how to connect to each other. Websites or servers that you connect to over the Internet are able to determine the country you are visiting from based on your IP address.

In order to make the server you’re connecting to think you’re visiting from another country, the server needs to see your IP address as an IP address from that country. Usually this is achieved by creating a VPN or tunnel to a server in another country, and sending all your Internet traffic via that server. This works well, but its hard to setup and all your Internet traffic goes via this tunnel which can dramatically reduce your connection speed.

Getflix is different. We don’t use complex VPNs or tunnels. We use a technology called DNS to re-route only connections of interest to overseas servers. If you think of IP addresses as phone numbers, then think of DNS as the phone book. It is used to look up a name (e.g. www.getflix.com.au) and find it’s IP address.

Once you signup to Getflix, you can use our DNS servers instead of the DNS servers provided by your ISP. Most DNS look ups you make we simply forward on to another DNS server. However, for DNS requests to certain servers (such as www.netflix.com), we return the IP address of our US server. This means any device you use to access services like Netflix or Hulu are actually connecting to our US-based server instead of the real Netflix or Hulu servers.

When your connection arrives at our US server, we simply forward the connection to it’s original intended destination. The only difference is that the destination server sees your request coming from our US server’s IP address, instead of your IP address, so it thinks your based in the US!

The major advantage of this approach over others is that only a small number of connections are re-routed via our US servers. All of your regular Internet browsing is unaffected. Even the video streams from Netflix and Hulu are not re-routed, video is streamed directly from Netflix and Hulu to you. All of the country and location checks that Netflix and Hulu perform are completed prior to streaming the video, so there is no need for us to re-route these connections.

Your privacy is important to us. Even though Getflix serves your DNS requests and some of your Netflix and Hulu connections pass through our servers, we do not log, analyse, inspect or archive any of your data.

What is the difference between a Smart DNS service and a VPN?

A Smart DNS service only re-routes SOME of your Internet connections via overseas servers. A VPN re-routes ALL of your Internet traffic via an overseas server. Also, Smart DNS provides no encrption or privacy, whereas a VPN does (all traffic between your device and the VPN server is encrypted). Getflix provides a Smart DNS service, but each active account also comes with a free, optional Full VPN as well!

What is the difference between DNS-over-VPN and VPN?

DNS-over-VPN is a special VPN service that allows you to access our Smart DNS servers in situations where you otherwise can’t (e.g. hotel or public WiFi). Only DNS traffic is routed via the VPN, so it doesn’t provide any encryption or privacy. Think of it as an alternative way of accessing our DNS servers. A regular VPN (or Full VPN) re-routes ALL of your Internet traffic via an overseas server and provides encryption and privacy between your device and the VPN server. Getflix provides both DNS-over-VPN (free with all accounts) as well as a Full VPN service (free with all paid accounts)!

Does Getflix work in hotel rooms and other public WiFi hotspots?

Yes, our DNS-over-VPN feature allows your devices to use our DNS servers in situations where 3rd-party DNS servers are blocked or hijacked. See this article on our support site for more details. Each paid account also comes with a free, optional Full VPN as well!

Is Getflix safe to use?

Yes, using our service is safe. When you use our DNS servers, all your DNS requests come to our DNS servers. So in theory, we could see all your DNS requests (which webpages you visited, etc). However, we do not log, archive or track any of this data except to provide support. When we enable logging for support, we get always your permission first, then only log requests from your IP address (no one else’s requests are logged).

The vast majority of the DNS requests we receive are forwarded directly to a public DNS server (like your ISP does), we only intercept some requests for netflix.com, hulu.com, etc and return the IP addresses of our servers in the US. So when you make a connection to Netflix, you are actually routing via our US servers. Again, we could in theory intercept these connections if we wanted to, but we don’t. Most of these connections are HTTPS though, so even if we did intercept them, we couldn’t read any of the content.