OpenDNS: What's Your Take?

For those of you that haven't clicked one of the attractive orange logos flying around the forums lately:

"OpenDNS offers DNS resolution for consumers and businesses as an alternative to using their Internet service provider's DNS servers. By placing company servers in strategic locations and employing a large cache of the domain names, DNS queries are processed much more quickly, thereby increasing page retrieval speed." Since last July, the number daily requests has shot up from ten million to just shy of a billion.

The folks at OpenDNS provide a 'free' (more on that in a second) alternative to the DNS servers provided by your ISP. The basic idea being consistently fast domain name resolution, with some phishing protection and 'domain name spell checking' thrown in. The service noticeably improved browsing speeds on my 6Mbps cable connection. (being provided by a small Canadian ISP with notoriously poor DNS servers) Several of my friends report massive improvements when using OpenDNS on college/university campuses.

OpenDNS makes its money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo that the service can fix. If for example, you spelled Google.com 'G123ggle.com' in your address bar, you would be sent to an OpenDNS search page instead of the usual 404 page.

Have you used OpenDNS? What's your take?

View: OpenDNS