Unfortunately, when your computer is in the wild, such as on a WiFi hotspot, your computer may not be on a trustworthy network. DNS was designed for an internet where the network was completely trusted: when a computer wishes to be directed to a computer at a specific numeric IP address, it was assumed the network would reliably and truthfully directed you to that computer. Well, when your computer talks to a regular DNS, it does so in a very trusting manner. What’s that and how does it make them money? What is OpenDNS’s economic incentive to do this? Just like Google sells information about the click throughs that occur when people search on Google, OpenDNS sells information about who is looking up which websites when.Īdditionally, OpenDNS sells premium DNS services to large organizations like BP and Eastern Mountain Sports. Doing it in a DNS server is the perfect place to do it, instead of each computer, because it is centralized in “the cloud.” They added things parental controls and usage monitor. It is likely that if you change your computer to use OpenDNS, you will have a faster browsing experience.īut the folks at OpenDNS didn’t stop there.

OpenDNS solved that by creating a really, really, REALLY fast and reliable DNS. What does that mean to you? Slow lookups… which means it takes longer to get to the website you want to view. Unfortunately, while DNS is very important to the proper operation of their network, they really don’t spend a lot of time optimizing it. Think of DNS like a phone book: you search for a name and end up with a phone number.Īll internet service providers (ISPs) provide DNS services. When you type in “into your browser, the network software in your computer sends it to a DNS server which returns a numeric IP address. In fact, one has to wonder why Google didn’t think of this… and why they aren’t competing.ĭNS is the internet service your computer uses to find servers on the web. They are so big, it is difficult to see a competitor trying to come after them. They took a pretty mundane job that needs to be done, reliable domain name services (DNS), and have created the number one DNS service on the internet. I think Clayton Christensen would be proud.

I’ve got to hand it to the folks at OpenDNS… they are really, really, smart cookies.

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