Who’s Not Using OpenDNS Yet?

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OpenDNS was founded in 2006 and ever since then I've been addicted to it. Each time I'm diagnosing network issues I manually add the magic numbers for DNS. The four simple numbers are 4.2.2.1; forever embedded in to my memory. So why do I use it you ask it? For a variety of reasons. Mainly for speed, but there are others...

Faster internet speed

I use Comcast as my ISP. While they do have decent bandwidth, their DNS queries are slow and unreliable. The ping time is quicker to the OpenDNS server than to the Comcast DNS server. However, this might not be true for you. The recommended name servers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. I get faster results with the lesser known one.

Since OpenDNS is so large, it has the user base to cache millions upon millions of pages. This saves you an extra trip to a server to look up an IP. Their software relies on the webmaster to tell OpenDNS how long to cache their page using the Time to live setting.

Reliability

They have thousands of servers around the world ready to serve you. If anything goes wrong with one part of the network, a different part takes over. Using some of the most well known ISPs such as NTT, UUNET, and Cognet, there's virtually 100% uptime. When I use my default nameservers, sometimes I'll notice Firefox saying looking up google.com and delaying there for a bit. The page would then just load instantly. With OpenDNS both the query to look up Google

Phishing protection

Phishing is a common problem as the internet grows. Attackers will create domains that look similar to popular websites and then setup look alike sites to steal passwords. While the human eye might not recognize the slight differences in these phishing sites, OpenDNS has a blacklist of known phishing websites. It'll compare the website you're visiting to the black list and then prevent the websites content from being viewed.

Block adult sites

OpenDNS has an option to block websites deemed by St. Bernard to be indecent. St. Bernard is commonly accepted as a web filter at most schools and works; including mine. There is an option to add a custom logo for the blocked website to suite your company or family's needs.

Track website statistics

With the statistics feature it makes it possible to track which websites you've been to and how many times. It'll conviently place that on a graph or chart. A lot of people might find that to be a bad feature. However, that leads me to my next point...

OpenDNS data retention

Non customers like myself will have their IPs logged for 2 business days. Not bad considering other companies like Google will keep it for 18 months. A customer has an option not to log the data at all, as well as an option to just delete the data from their system completly. Neat huh?

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