A recent New York Times interview with OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch prompted today’s blog post. This is actually one of my favorite speedup tips for residential broadband users, and it should work for Oceanic Time Warner, Hawaiian Telcom and Clearwire customers.
Speed up your web browsing one simple change on your router or computer — for free!
The billso.com domain name is much easier to remember than its current IP address of 208.97.168.17, so one service that every ISP provides access to is the Domain Name System or DNS. The DNS is a remarkable distributed database that maps alphanumeric web addresses to the numeric equivalents. Without DNS, the Internet as we know it just wouldn’t work.
If you’d like to do your own lookups to see the IP addresses of other web sites, try this page.
From what I’ve seen, OpenDNS is certainly faster than other domain name services that I’ve tried. Here’s the company’s explanation. I’m not sure if OpenDNS works as well outside the United States, however. The company has a data center in London and will open another facility in Hong Kong, to complement its four data centers in the mainland United States.
It only takes a few minutes to change your computer’s domain name settings to the OpenDNS servers, as long as you have administrative rights on your computer. Just read the OpenDNS tutorial and make the appropriate choices. Be sure to reboot or restart your computer after confirming the changes.
If you have a router at home, you might consider changing the domain name settings on the router, instead of changing the settings on all your computers. Again, be sure to save or confirm the changes on your router.
Note: If you use your portable computer in your employer’s office, you should check with your IT staff before changing the domain name settings.
Many ISPs rely on domain name servers provided by an upstream provider. Some ISPs host their own domain name servers. In both cases, the response time for a user can lag for a variety of reasons. The slower the DNS service, the longer it takes your ISP to route your request for a web page to the right IP address.
Most ISPs let their users select their own DNS servers. While there are a variety of free and public DNS servers available on the Internet, most of them cannot handle a large number of simultaneous users.
Security is another concern. I wouldn’t trust an domain name server from a third party that isn’t my ISP or employer, unless there was a good reason to do so. After all, it is trivial for the server’s admin to substitute the IP address of a spoof web site for a popular domain name such as paypal.com or ebay.com.
OpenDNS appears to be trustworthy, so I feel confident that they are looking up the correct IP addresses. The service will also block phishing sites, adult web sites, as well as auto-correcting mispelled domain names like cnn.cmo — for most users, that name should probably be cnn.com, after all.
There are business that are built on misspelled domain names, however. Some call this practice typosquatting, and Valleywag has a brief discussion of this practice here.
I’ve already posted some articles about the Domain Name System (DNS):
- March 23: .xxx and the Domain Name System
- February 6, 2007: The story of .um
- February 6, 2007: Hackers attack .org computers
