We’re growing like a weed. Yesterday, we handled 14 billion DNS requests in a single day for the first time. I didn’t get a chance to blog about our previous DNS request milestones because we’ve been heads-down working on some really awesome new features and adding a bunch of capacity.

We also updated our System Status page today to show you what I mean. We’ll be bringing up a new location in Amsterdam in the next couple months and we’re working on a strategy to bring OpenDNS closer to our users in Asia.

I’ve brought back the dancing banana to help celebrate this awesome achievement. I remember when we did 100 million requests total in a single month and how awesome *that* was. Today we’re handling over 200,000 requests per second at peak load. Simply awesome. My hats off to our great ops and engineering teams and thanks to all of you who have helped us grow over the last three years.

A few months ago we told you about a major milestone for the Domain Tagging system and the OpenDNS community – an impressive 5 million unique domains submitted into the system. And today I’m excited to tell you about another milestone. We officially now have 1 million domains verified in the system. That means they’ve been submitted, tagged, voted on and confirmed. (This is in addition to the millions of domains in the seven Adult categories from our friends at St. Bernard Software.)

When we introduced you to the Domain Tagging system, which powers our Web content filtering service, we explained it was better than any other filtering system for three reasons:

1. It’s more comprehensive. The system has more than 50,000 people submitting and voting on sites. This is in stark contrast to a mere handful of people employed for this job by security companies offering Web content filtering.

2. It’s faster-moving. New Web sites and changes to existing Web sites are constantly being published to the Internet. Other Web content filtering systems update only once nightly, or even less frequently, and therefore fail to catch and categorize everything right away. The OpenDNS community is always adding and tagging sites, so you benefit from real-time updates.

3. It’s free to use. No longer are you forced to pay top dollar to keep your network safe and secure.

I talk to you, our customers and our community, every day and hear how much you value a Web content filtering system that works reliably and keeps the people on your network safe online. Whether it’s businesses, school districts, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), hospitals or households, everyone appreciates the service our community powers and OpenDNS provides.

In the coming months, we’ll be working be working on improvements to the Domain Tagging System that encourage more voting. Perhaps even some prizes for the most active and accurate voters… But in honor of this milestone, take a few minutes today and vote on some domains.

Since we launched OpenDNS three years ago, I’m proud to say we’ve made tremendous strides in our quest to make the Internet better. The innovations and improvements we’ve made to the DNS – a 25 year-old system that hadn’t been updated at all before OpenDNS came along – can’t be underestimated. With your help, we’ve built the world’s largest clearinghouse of phishing data and a community-powered Web content filtering system that keeps Internet users at schools, libraries, businesses and in households around the globe safe online. We’ve made Internet navigation more intelligent, provided you a better DNS than that from your ISP and delivered innovations like SmartCache and Conficker protection. In short – as a company and as a community we’ve built something really great.

Over the past few years we’ve been approached more and more frequently by other organizations wanting to integrate the OpenDNS service or some part of the OpenDNS service – our Web content filtering, or our faster, more reliable DNS – into their products and services. In many cases, their customers are actually asking for OpenDNS integration to make it easier for techies and non-techies alike to use our services. We’ve heard the same from you, too – many of you have asked us directly to work with router companies and make OpenDNS more accessible and easier to set up.

In January we announced a partnership with NETGEAR, a world-class router manufacturer, to deliver Web content filtering and phishing protection to its customers. And later this summer many new model NETGEAR routers will offer parental controls powered by OpenDNS, giving NETGEAR customers around the world an easy way to use our service.

And so today I am pleased to introduce Best Path Networks, a new arm of OpenDNS that will work to provide our services to partners. Each integration and partnership will be different – customized to provide value to different audiences. Where one partner elects to integrate and provide our Web content filtering and phishing protection, another partner might want only our faster, more reliable DNS, and sometimes a partner may choose to white-label the service as their own – and that’s okay with us.

Making OpenDNS available to more people is good for the Internet. It means more people are protected from phishing and other nefarious activities, and it means more people have a choice in their DNS. It also means the Internet performs more reliably and people are forced to tolerate fewer outages. It also means we’ll continue spending resources on improving and extending the OpenDNS network for you since all of our partners will be utilizing our existing (and growing) infrastructure.

We know you use OpenDNS because you love the service, so we’ve taken specific steps to ensure using OpenDNS will always be your choice. We also want to make sure you know we won’t form a partnership with any organization that limits your ability to use OpenDNS as you do today.

It’s been three years since we started OpenDNS and it seems like we’ve accomplished a lot, but we’ve only just begun innovating – we have a roadmap of great new features we’ll continue to deliver to you throughout the course of this year that we’ll announce here on this blog. As always, we welcome feedback – in Idea Bank, our forums or right here in the comments.