Yeah, we make your life easier with our 100% reliability and we save you time with super speedy browsing. We even keep you and yours safe with optional phishing protection. But often times it’s hard to quantify the amount of money we save you.

Not anymore, say our customers.

Since launching adult site blocking earlier this month, we’ve heard our free service is saving thousands of dollars for companies and organizations who would otherwise pay for a similar service that does the exact same thing - often not even as well as we do it.

This is great for companies, but even greater for schools and libraries with very limited technology budget, combined with regulations requiring filters to keep kids safe online. Like Jackson School District and Berkeley Public Libraries.

We’re glad we can provide you such an awesome service without exhausting your budget.

We moved our San Francisco offices this week (a block away) and had to update our address in a bunch of places. I took that as an opportunity to review our Terms of Use.

Very little needs changing, but I wanted to share the updates clearly in this blog post. You may view the original Terms of Use here.

Changes

• Updated office address.
• Updated email address for questions about the Terms of Use. The previous one was a spam magnet.
• Added the section Blocking Services. When we launched in July 2006, we didn’t have domain blocking or adult site blocking. Now we do. This section is broad enough to cover additional categories and like functionality in the future.
• Updated the tense in the section Content Posted by User(s). The text previously read:
  

  “OpenDNS may, in the future, provide features through the Service which allow users to upload, submit, disclose, distribute or otherwise post Content at or on the Site or otherwise through the Service.”

  We’ve added forums and your own custom image and announcement on the Guide page during the last year. The future is here, and the first part of the sentence now reads “OpenDNS provides features…”

• Added clarification to make clear that the Creative Commons license and copyright applied to our Terms of Use. The “work” referred to in the license is the Terms of Use itself and not the entire OpenDNS website.

The Internet is a big place and even with the best filtering you will eventually stumble upon a site you wish you could just “un-see.” Unfortunately, we can’t erase that mental picture from your mind, but we can let you help protect others from the same experience.

When you stumble across a site you think should be blocked by one of our 6 categories of adult site blocking, let us know. Head on over to the adult domain checker, enter the domain of the site, and click the “Check this site” button. If there is no match against the St. Bernard iGuard database, you will be given the opportunity to submit it for human review.

You can even consider it your good deed for the day.

Once a year, we honor the person who keeps the mail server running, restores the file you accidentally deleted and makes sure you can watch funny videos of cats. This person is the SysAdmin, the unsung hero of every great company. Ours is George. George makes sure that the right wires are connected to the right routers to the right switches to the right servers, which are connected to the right databases so that you get the best DNS service in the world.

At OpenDNS, we make the SysAdmin’s life easier every day by giving you all those green checkmarks signifying day after day of zero downtime along with the features to help make doing your job easier. SysAdmins are so important, we think it’s lame they only get one day of honor. It’s no secret that most times the SysAdmin only gets recognized when things go wrong. So this year, OpenDNS is celebrating SysAdmin Day throughout the month of July, not just on July 27th.

Every Monday in July we’ll deliver you a challenge, and every Friday we’ll announce the winner on our blog. Only SysAdmins are welcome to participate. Prizes will surely be something you consider a gift. (Hint: It won’t be more DNS uptime. You’re using OpenDNS, so you get that anyway. Hint 2: It includes the words “Gift” and “Certificate.”)

The guys at AdminSpotting sum it up so well, so we thank them for the below poem. There were a few bad words we left out of our version, read theirs for the original, in all its SysAdmin-y glory.

Read and enjoy, SysAdmins. It’s not just your day, it’s your month.

Choose no life. Choose no career. Choose no family. Choose a big computer, choose hard disks the size of washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest car loans. Choose a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair for your office in a range of fabrics. Choose NNTP and wondering why you’re logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web sites, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, [omitted] up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate. Choose your future. Choose sysadmining.

Yesterday, OpenDNS resolved its 200,000,000,000th request. That’s 200 billion with a b.

Thank you to our many customers for making OpenDNS the world’s largest and fastest-growing DNS service. It’s been less than 3 months since we responded to the 100 billionth request. We’ve averaged more than 1 billion requests/day for that period. On Thursday, OpenDNS responded to 1.4 billion DNS requests (stats).

All that, with zero downtime (system status), thanks to multiple servers spread across five geographically distributed locations connected by multiple Tier 1 telco providers to deliver an amazingly fast, reliable Internet experience no matter the size of your network.

Come on in! Get started.

The magic numbers:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220