Atmosphere Protective DNS

Network-level protection from malware, phishing, ads, and unwanted content — stopped at the resolver, before the connection is ever opened.

Atmosphere Protective DNS at a glance

Atmosphere is a Protective DNS service: every domain your devices look up is checked against curated threat intelligence and content policy before a connection is made. Known malware, phishing, and command-and-control domains never resolve, and category-based policy gives you precise control over ads, trackers, adult content, and other categories you'd rather not see on your network. Atmosphere is included with every Neptune Internet subscription, runs across our domestic infrastructure in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide, and can also be attached to any Neptune VPN tunnel — so the same protection follows you off the home network onto your phone or laptop. All lists are curated and refreshed by Neptune daily, organised into categories you can toggle individually, and configurable per subscription and per tunnel from the subscriber portal.

Try it out

Pick one or more categories below, then enter a domain to see whether it would be blocked. By default, all categories are turned off. Atmosphere draws on more than 20 curated and community-driven threat-intelligence feeds — refreshed daily so protection keeps pace with new malware families, phishing kits, and ad networks — plus Neptune's own internal additions for emerging threats. Every list ships with its source repository and licence, so you can audit exactly what Atmosphere blocks before you turn anything on. The full set is grouped into the foldable sections below.

How Atmosphere Protective DNS Works

Atmosphere is a managed Protective DNS service built in house on top of Blocky (opens in new tab) with Neptune-specific extensions for per-subscription policy, dynamic blocklist orchestration, and query logging. Every Neptune subscriber gets their own set of categories, allow lists, deny lists, and an optional privacy mode — all configurable from the subscriber portal, with no on-device software required. Atmosphere also runs on Neptune VPN, so when you turn the toggle on for a tunnel terminating in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, or Adelaide, the same protection applies to every device connected through that tunnel. Our dedicated DNS infrastructure in those five Australian metropolitan markets keeps lookups local and latency low.

Highly available, anycast architecture

Atmosphere runs as a three-tier anycast service from five Australian points of presence — Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide — designed so a single rack, link, or upstream failure never turns into a DNS outage for our customers.

• Anycast DNS load balancers at the edge announce the same address from every Neptune PoP. Your query lands on the nearest healthy node automatically — no failover for clients to configure, no broken state when a region drains for maintenance.
• Highly available Atmosphere filtering clusters sit behind the load balancers and apply your per-subscription policy: blocklists, allow lists, query logging, privacy mode, and bypass. Clusters are deployed redundantly within each region so a single node loss is invisible to clients.
• Optimised DNS recursive resolvers on the back end perform the actual lookups, with cache locality and routing policy tuned to land you on the closest CDN edge for every major content provider. Blocked traffic is dropped; clean traffic stays fast.

Atmosphere speaks DNS over UDP, DNS over TCP, DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and DNS over TLS (DoT) in every region. Anycast routing always picks the lowest-latency path, so an encrypted resolver in Adelaide stays as fast as the unencrypted one in Melbourne.