My internet provider’s DNS servers are slow. At least, this is what I had come to believe when I set out in search of better ones. Aside from the fact that fast, reliable, public nameservers are scarce, I came away with more questions than I went in with.
I run a small network in my home using a D-Link 802.11g router which lets me set nameservers that override any defaults that might otherwise have been garnered from my internet provider. My wish was to find a pair of addresses that I could query for once and for all and use them as my default servers at the router level.
A search for “public+name+servers” uncovers OpenNIC’s Public Name Servers but their site confuses me, especially when I read directly above a list of server addresses that,
...users may not query these servers directly, as they are intended for terminating recursive queries by the user’s nearest Tier 2 server.
If users aren’t permitted to query them, why are they listed on the public dns server page? What happens if I do use them—will I get in trouble? Further down in the page, there is a list of Tier 2 servers but there are none geographically close to me. Still, I tested them anyway and concluded that they were slower than my provider’s.
Nearing the brink of extreme frustration, I stumbled across a service called OpenDNS, a free provider of the very DNS services I was looking for. They’re fast. Really fast. And they also provide nice-to-have features like phishing protection and spelling correction. They achieve great query speed by maintaining an ultra-large cache and and impressive geographical coverage area, meaning your queries don’t have to look very far in search of an answer.
Their website is also well-designed and easy to use. There is nothing even remotely confusing about it, which is rare among the sites of similar contenders in the DNS space. Easy to follow, image-based instructions for changing the DNS servers are provided for nearly every router in existence, so finding your router and updating your entire network is a breeze. If you don’t want to do this at the router level, or if you have a portable computer, like I do, and want to use OpenDNS from wherever you are, instructions are provided for configuring any operating system.
If you’re looking for faster DNS services, do yourself a favor and give them a go: http://opendns.com
You missed out the part where invalid domains come up as advert splashes ala Verisign sitefinder. This was what ultimately put me off using them; everything else was fine just a bit of a deal breaker.