dennis yang dot com

A few months ago, a friend of mine that used to work with me at CNET, John Roberts, left to join a startup called OpenDNS. DNS? Really? The last cool DNS project I heard about was EasyDNS (correction.. EveryDNS — thanks Mark!), back when I was frantically trying to find someone to be my authoritative name server. Coincidentally, the EasyDNS dude went on to found OpenDNS.

Anyway, I think get how the Internets kind of works, and while speeding up DNS lookup really would in theory make the general experience better.. But I always assumed that DNS lookups were cached like crazy in just about every spot that used them, so I was frankly a little doubtful as to how noticeable a faster DNS would be..

Well.. I’m now convinced. It’s faster with OpenDNS.

Upon immediate installation of OpenDNS… all of a sudden, everything sped up.. Installation is slighty techy — you have to go and configure the DNS settings in your router.. but they provide easy step-by-step instructions, and after installation, I had to hard reboot my router after a harrowing 10 minutes *GASP* without an internet connection.

I was starting to get accustomed to the laaaaaag of certain sites when you first type them into the browser, but I had always assumed that it was the slowness of web servers that I was accessing.. I guess I was wrong.

Not convinced? If you like charts and numbers, this dude measured the speed difference with OpenDNS and published the results. (ok, no charts, just numbers.)

OpenDNS also claims to help make the Internet safer by blocking out domains to phishing sites and such… but I haven’t seen how that’s going to work just yet… I wonder if another revenue source for them would be to block out adult sites and such (for parents watching over their kids’ surfing and such)..

But for now, I’m using it mainly because it makes my Internets faster (cuz, you know.. the Internet is a series of tubes [thanks Audris!])..

Props to John and the OpenDNS folks..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 3:17 pm and is filed under cool stuff i found, general, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.