I've moved into a new house after the wildfire devastation of June 23, 2012. Internet service from cable Baja Broadband was connected on Monday morning. Strong service with 12 Mb/s down and 1 Mb/s up. Pretty good for the rural mountains.
Anyway, I was having Internet "connection persistance" issues. As much as I like my Internet provider, I finally narrowed the problem down to the DNS servers they provided.
So, I changed to OpenDNS servers. Solved a whole lot of problems and now my MacPro on Safari 6.0 is a rocket. I am not suggesting you spend any money, because the
DNS ip addresses are free. But, I wanted my friends and peers at DPC to know there can be performance improvements by stepping around your local ISP.
+1 to this. Richard, glad to see you are getting re-settled.
Thanks, Fritz. Much appreciated. Getting back on track... yes! I was so sad to miss the Fractals challenge, but it's not always possible to juggle everything at once.
I see you have to sign up with some minimal personal info....
What is the main benefit?
You actually don't... you can just set your DNS server settings to point to the two servers and Bob's your uncle. Google public DNS is another good option.
ETA: For example, when I very recently switched ISPs, I noticed that when I initiated a search through my browser to Google, there would be a de3lay of several seconds before the page even began to load. Upon investigating I found that my DNS settings went back to "automatic" after reconfiguring my router and computer network settings for the new ISP. After changing back to public DNS, those pages now load as fast as other pages. The ISP's DNS servers appear to have been the problem. I know I had problems related to my last ISP's DNS occasionally as well, one reason I had gone to public DNS in the first place.
The benefit for these companies usually falls with misspelled domains. For example if you type dp hallenge.com (forgetting the c) your average ISP will open a search window using Google or whatever search engine they have a contract with, on that page are sponsored results and usually an ad or two somewhere mixed in. Eyeballs = money, even if it's accidental eyeballs.
You can usually opt out of this kind of auto search, but it's usually turned on by default.
Hmm...I'll have to give it a try. Generally, I haven't seen any issues with slow responding sites when typing a name. I have Comcast and everything seems pretty solid.
I used to use Google DNS but I figured they were probably using it as another source of information gathering rather than out of the goodness of their heart, and while I have no problem with them gathering my data from Google+ and Google services in general, I don't particularly like the thought of them seeing everything I do on the internet.
As such I switched to Open DNS and have had absolutely no problem with them, I too would recommend them.
I work in IS for a living so I think I get what you are saying, but just so I am sure, are you talking about going into your router and manually setting the dns server address?
I used to use Google DNS but I figured they were probably using it as another source of information gathering rather than out of the goodness of their heart, and while I have no problem with them gathering my data from Google+ and Google services in general, I don't particularly like the thought of them seeing everything I do on the internet.
are you talking about going into your router and manually setting the dns server address?
It's a network setting on your computer, not the router.
I might have to disagree with that, if I set it on my router it affects all pc's at my house. They have tutorials at the open dns site to change it in router anyways
eta, just did it and cleared tje cache, it seems like pages do indeed pop up faster
I might have to disagree with that, if I set it on my router it affects all pc's at my house.
Depends on your settings. If your computer defers DNS lookups to the router, then yes, that would work.
I believe it's not a case of deferring the DNS lookups that smardaz is talking about, but a computer being provided with DNS settings by the router during DHCP setup. This is how I have it setup, the router supplies Open DNS server addresses to the computers when they get their IP address (also from the router), and then the computers use that stored info to perform their own DNS lookups.
You can set the router or the computer. If you set it on the router it affects all the computers on that network, but if you set both, the computer's settings override the routers for that computer.
