Chilling_Silence's blogSpeed up your internet with OpenDNS
If the button says “Sweeeeet” then good on you for doing the right thing and using OpenDNS. If it says “Get Started” then read on!
What’s that you say? I can speed up my internet without doing anything? Surely not?
Well you’re kind of right, technically we’re not going to “speed it up”, however pages and websites will appear to load much faster, making better use of your connection.
Here’s how the Internet works:
Every computer has an Address that consists of up to 12 digits. Those addresses may look something like: 210.48.100.45
DNS is the name of the “protocol” that changes what you type (Such as Pressf1.co.nz or google.co.nz) in to that computers IP Address (210.48.100.45 or 64.233.169.104). Regardless of if you noticed this or not in the past, you’re using DNS every time you go to a new website, or Ads get loaded from a different server on the website you’re using. You’re most likely just using your ISP’s default servers, the details of them are given to your PC / Modem / Router and it’s told to use your ISP’s DNS servers every time you connect to the Interent.
The problem is that many DNS Servers like your ISP’s aren’t always setup as well as they could be. Â That’s not specifically your ISP’s fault, it just seems to be the way it is. They’re just not always as reliable as they could be, nor as fast.
Here’s where OpenDNS comes in. It’s free for anybody to use, it’s super fast, incredibly reliable, and it’s got some other cool features you can play with later such as blocking pornographic websites or known malware sites. Here’s a little bit about OpenDNS:
http://www.opendns.com/solutions/overview/
Basically, some people at times  have issues with websites taking their time to load certain parts (Like the Ads seem to always stop the page from loading completely), and mostly people try to blame the website itself. However, what I’ve found in NZ is that it’s more often than not DNS that’s causing the issues if you’re trying to go to somewhere like TradeMe and find it’s slow (or that your PC may have spyware / malware / viruses etc), and not the actual website itself.
Anyway, here’s some useful documentation to get you up and running:
If you’re a Home User trialling it on a single PC
If you’re on a Network and want to change your Router settings
I suggest you try it on just your PC first, and be amazed at the difference it can really make to your browsing!
When you’re done, you can come back to this page and see if the Button up the top of the screen has changed to say that you’re now using OpenDNS, or not.
If this helps you, please let me know, leave a brief comment, I’d love to hear from you.
Open DNS sometimes isn’t that great for speeding up your Internet. Since the latency to their servers will be much higher than ur isp’s dns server. Also many content caching system such as Akamai use dns to redirect your traffic to the closest server, meaning you will be using the Akamai server closest to the dns server, rather then your isp.
Hi Evan,
You’ve got some good points there, and you’re right, in some cases Akamai and others can do that. However, I’ve also found I personally spend longer waiting for websites that are poorly written which only display the main content once Ads load, and the Ads sometimes take forever. Also, even though the latency between their servers may be greater, we’re talking in my case it’s 180ms vs 30ms. That, I don’t notice, but for some reason browsing just “feels” faster with OpenDNS than my ISPs DNS servers in general. Sadly I’ve had to change back to Telecom’s, as I’m on Big Time, and I miss out on the YouTube caching if I don’t.