Having tested out google’s new public DNS service, i decided that whilst i was at it, i’d give OpenDNS a go. I’d heard of OpenDNS as it came up as a good solution whenever ISP’s were overloaded with attacks.
I also know a bit about DNS (forced in to studying it at college) but the REAL reason i know about it is mainly because of eircom’s problems with it 🙂 Anyway, i signed up to OpenDNS and started using it. Haven’t stopped since either.
It’s faster plus it gives me my own dashboard & stats and i can even block websites or filter content using their own pre-configured security levels (very handy if you have kids in a house or just want to piss people off by denying them access to google.com or something!). So it allows you to play God.
One other handy feature is that it allows you to create shortcuts. So lets’s say i want to go to www.smemon.com. I can just type ‘smemon’ in my browser, which will in turn contact OpenDNS, recognise that i have ‘smemon’ set as a shortcut for www.smemon.com and then take me there.
You can of course do this through a router’s software, but it’s just easier using OpenDNS and you don’t have to be at home to do it. This report from PC Mag confirms OpenDNS is much faster than default DNS settings, but it’s also faster or at least as fast as Google’s Public DNS.
So you get more control, get stats on everything that’s happening on the network and you can view them online. The speed gained is in milliseconds, so for the average user who just doesn’t care about speed or control, it’s pretty pointless making changes like this – you won’t really notice any difference.
Anyway, i’m sure OpenDNS were quietly cursing google when they first heard about their new DNS service, but had Google not announced their DNS service, i wouldn’t be an OpenDNS user now and i wouldn’t be blogging about it, so i’d imagine it’s not all bad news for OpenDNS (assuming there are more people like myself out there).