It’s hard to believe, but it was four years ago this month that OpenDNS launched. Just a short time into our quest to make the world’s Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, we’ve grown into the world’s largest DNS provider and achieved some unprecedented milestones. Our growth is largely attributable to people like you spreading the word about our service and introducing others to a better DNS, and we can’t thank you enough for that.

Just a few of the our milestones:

• A full one percent of all Internet users in the world — more than 18 million people globally — are using OpenDNS.
• One out of every three public K-12 schools in the U.S. uses OpenDNS, including some of the country’s largest school districts in the largest cities, like Baltimore, Detroit and San Diego.
• Just shy of 1 million phishes submitted to the PhishTank, the free community Web site where anyone can submit, verify, track and share phishing data. (Help us hit the 1 million landmark — submit a phish here.)
• A staggering 26+ billion DNS queries per day.

And of course, we’ve accomplished all of this with zero downtime, making the Internet more reliable than ever before for all of our users.

We’re going to be celebrating our birthday on Twitter over the next week by giving away four prizes (for our fourth birthday) every day. What kind of stuff are we talking about? Prizes include free home subscriptions for OpenDNS Deluxe, stylish OpenDNS t-shirts, goodie bags with awesome OpenDNS merch, and more!

Participating is simple — the easiest way to enter is to follow OpenDNS on Twitter and then retweet this post:

OpenDNS.com turns 4 this month! Giving away 4 prizes daily to celebrate. Follow @OpenDNS & RT this to enter! #OpenDNS4

Or, simply start following @OpenDNS and then tell your followers why they should use OpenDNS, too. Include #OpenDNS4 to have your tweets included in the contest. Each tweet is a separate entry, so feel free to enter more than once. We’ll pick daily winners randomly from all who enter, and we’ll follow up with you on Twitter if you’re a winner!