Using OpenDNS for reliable, feature rich DNS

Yesterday and today I was annoyed to find that some of my domains had disappeared from the face of the earth.  Others that were assigned to the same server were responding normally and the server was up and functioning fine.  At first I thought it must be a problem relating to Godaddy DNS services (they host my DNS) which would pass.  After 12 or so hours, the problem hadn’t went away so I looked for another solution.  After a quick google search for alternative DNS solutions I stumbled upon the OpenDNS project.  The goal of OpenDNS is simple:

OpenDNS is a better DNS service. We make your Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. It’s free, and there’s nothing to download.

So I went ahead and switched my DNS IPs to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (if you don’t know how to do this post a comment below and I’ll reply with a guide :) ).  Straight away a ping to www.groomi.net showed that the problem was with Virgin Media’s crappy DNS servers.

One thing that annoyed me though, was OpenDNS’ money-making method.  I mis-typed a web address and was instantly greeted with an ugly search page littered with banners: http://guide.opendns.com/?url=www.qwertyuiop.  This alone was enough to put me off using OpenDNS until I discovered that you can register an account at OpenDNS.com which allows you to disable this feature, track your DNS traffic,  Enable/Disable content filtering + phishing protection and much more.

Since finding this I am very happy with the service that OpenDNS offer and would reccomend it to anyone!

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categories The Internet | Stephen Groom | datetime July 12, 2009 5:15 pm

2 Comments

  • By Thirtysixway, July 12, 2009 @ 8:18 pm

    OpenDNS also makes it easy to filter internet without performance issues. At my highschool they have every student computer (a couple thousand) running through one proxy to filter. It’s been suggested before that using OpenDNS filtering would make things easier and faster… allwell

    also, you can sometimes use OpenDNS to get past some wifi systems that require you to register/pay.

  • By Stephen Groom, July 12, 2009 @ 9:29 pm

    Go on, free content!?… Such as what :)

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