We frequently hear from people who are excited because OpenDNS has increased their Internet speed. James Trippe is something of an extreme case. He recently reached out to us and told us about how websites were taking a minute to load on his machine when relying on his ISP for DNS. Once he set up OpenDNS, that dropped down to less than a second per page. Here, he tells us a little bit about why getting speedy Internet in his world can be quite the challenge.

Tell me a little bit about where you live?
I live in north Georgia in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The population here is less than 600 within the city proper, so I am in a quite remote area.

Does that affect your connectivity at all?
Yes, absolutely. There is only one ISP here, and they call the connectivity regarding my service their “best-effort.” In other words, it’s not guaranteed to work since I am so far out. Cell phone signals are also scant at best, negating the use of a USB modem via my cell phone company.

How did you find out about OpenDNS?
I was searching an Apple/Mac forum for ways to improve inordinately SLOW internet connectivity. Several members posted how well OpenDNS had worked for them.

While your Internet may lag from time to time (pre OpenDNS, of course) what’s the best part about living in a remote area?
A much lower population density: No traffic (anytime!), cleaner air and water, less noise, and beautiful land untouched by human hands.

And what do you most wish you could find at your local store that isn’t available?
I do a lot of gourmet cooking, and sometimes I am unable to find relatively obscure or exotic ingredients. Also FRESH seafood.

Interested in answering five questions for the OpenDNS Blog? Let us know!

Earlier this month, we asked you to come up with your favorite OpenDNS slogan. We like to say OpenDNS makes networks safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, but we wanted to hear how you describe us, too.

When we closed the contest on Sept. 15, there were hundreds and hundreds of submissions — 617, to be exact. What was so interesting in looking through your suggestions were the variety of reasons people use OpenDNS, and where they find the value in the service.

Some of you described how OpenDNS protects you from phishing websites. Others came up with slogans that highlighted how OpenDNS makes your Internet faster. And some contributions celebrated our malware protection. It’s clear that there are many reasons people love to set up OpenDNS on their networks!

After reading through all 617 submissions, picking our favorite ten, and putting them up for a vote on our Facebook page, here are the five winning fan-generated OpenDNS slogans.

• OpenDNS: Saving the Internet… one millisecond at a time (Jeremy Roman)
• OpenDNS: Get it. Set it. Forget it. Or you’ll regret it! (Kevin Broadey)
• Open up a world of Internet safety, reliability and flexibility. OpenDNS. (Kent Nemenzo)
• My DNS can beat up your DNS …. OpenDNS (Jeremy Roman)
• OpenDNS: Because the tubes won’t navigate themselves (Jordan Finnigan)

We’ll be getting in touch with all the winners shortly so that we can mail them OpenDNS t-shirts. Thanks to everyone who suggested a new slogan or tagline. It was so much fun to read and debate your submissions. Stay tuned for more contests and promotions, coming up in the next couple of months.

Yesterday, the DNS servers of Alice.it, one of Italy’s largest ISPs, went down for several hours. People who rely on Alice.it for their Internet waited. And waited. And then waited some more for their Internet to come back. Outages like these highlight the importance of a reliable DNS service; when it’s working, you don’t think much about it, but when it’s down, essentially so is your ability to access the Web.

As with similar outages in the past, like ones experienced in Germany and by Time Warner customers in 2008, users of OpenDNS didn’t notice any downtime at all. In fact, in all four plus years we’ve been around, OpenDNS has a perfect, 100 percent uptime record.

Because of the outage, we experienced a surge in traffic from Italy — not surprising, since word spread via Twitter and other methods that using OpenDNS was one of the only ways to regain access to the Web. We’d like to take the opportunity to welcome our new Italian users — benvenuto! We’re happy you’re here, and look forward to helping you enjoy a safer, faster, smarter and more reliable Internet.

When Internet and college students mix, there’s bound to be some less than savory websites being accessed. Such is the story of Alexander Brown, an IT support engineer at Boland College in South Africa. He was at his wit’s end until he discovered OpenDNS…

Tell us a little bit about Boland College?
Boland College is a Further Education and Training college in Worcester, South Africa. The college helps students who do not qualify for university to get a further education after completing high school. We have a wide range of subjects ranging from Farming Management to Information Technology. The Boland College group is made up out of six campuses all over the Western Cape Province.

How did Boland College start using OpenDNS?
About two years ago we received funding from our Department of Education to improve our campus network. We installed fiber optic lines and now have a 410-PC-strong network. This also meant that each and every class had access to the Internet. This was fantastic in the begining, but soon the reality of students on the internet became apparent.

I had to sit for hours and trawl through my proxy logs to find and see which porn sites and [filesharing] sites were being accessed by the students. I was slowly losing the battle. Having to manually create blacklists to block these sites was a major headache. In the end I just got fed up with it. Then I read an article in a local PC magazine. One of the guys explained an easy way to filter and manage your Internet use with out any fuss. They were explaining how OpenDNS worked.

And so…
The next day I went to your website and had a quick browse. It could not believe my eyes! Here was the solution to my biggest problem. I created an account and started testing to see what was filtered. Amazingly everything I tried I could not get pass the block page. What I love about this is I can manage the other campuses’ internet without even having to drive there. Fantastic!

The World Cup was recently held in South Africa… are you a big soccer fan?
It was an unbelievable month of intense suspense as the big guns in soccer played against each other. The feeling in South Africa at that time was amazing, people were talking soccer everywhere and bragging about their best teams and how far they will go. Some people were driving with little flags on their cars to show their support for their teams. Sadly South Africa didn’t get very far. So I supported the Netherlands all the way ’til the finals. It was so much fun!!!

What is the one tech gadget you can’t live without?
Gadget-wise, I am one of those guys that goes “Whoop” to everything with lots of buttons and lights. At this moment my Samsung touch screen phone is the gadget at the top of the list. With this I can do just about everything except for opening my beer.

Interested in answering five questions for the OpenDNS Blog? Let us know!

A recent survey of IT Managers revealed that dealing with proxies and anonymizers — websites that allow users on a network to bypass Web content filtering that’s been set up — is a major headache: 87 percent of IT managers in education think proxies are a problem, followed by 56 percent in the private sector and 44 percent in the public sector. The same study revealed that IT Managers are spending almost 30 percent more time this year dealing with proxy sites than they did last year.

We know (and you know) you’ve got better things to do with your time than deal with tracking down the latest proxies and anonymizers and manually blocking them.

That’s why we’ve offered this as a built in feature for more than three years. Like all of OpenDNS’ Web content filtering categories, the Proxy/Anonymizer category is constantly updated, thanks to the Domain Tagging community’s hard work.

To make sure you’re blocking proxies head to the dashboard, select your network and choose “Web Content Filtering.” From there, make sure to choose “Proxy/Anonymizer” as one of your categories to block. Once you do that, you can rest easy knowing what’s blocked on your network is blocked.

Starting today, all OpenDNS network administrators can choose whether or not they’d like to include a link to “Contact your network administrator” on the block page that pops up when users on your network try to access restricted content. Why the change? We heard from a number of you that the emails you received from the block page weren’t something you wanted to read. Based on that feedback, we decided to give you the choice of whether you wanted to receive these messages or not.

By default, we’ve left the link there, but you can turn it off by visiting the Settings tab in the Dashboard, selecting a network, and clicking on the Customization link. There, you’ll see a checkbox in the “User Feedback” section titled, “Show Contact Admin Form.”

At OpenDNS, we’re always focused on empowering our users through advanced customization options, whether it be the 50+ web content filtering categories, or incremental improvements like this one. If you have any ideas about how we can help you better personalize OpenDNS, let us know in the IdeaBank!

He rescues kittens in trees and people from car accidents. He’s a security official by day, and volunteer firefighter by night (and sometimes in the day, too). Meet Keith Young, EMT and volunteer firefighter for the Myersville Volunteer Fire Company. He’s the subject of this week’s “Five Questions” installment.

Why did the Myersville Volunteer Fire Company decide to use OpenDNS?
I wanted to reduce legal liability for having a wide-open Internet pipe in the firehouse by restricting adult-related traffic. We operate on some funding from the county along with donations from citizens, so we had to find a very inexpensive solution for web filtering.

Did you have a Web content filtering solution in place prior to OpenDNS?
No. We just couldn’t afford other solutions. Additionally, since the IT infrastructure at the station is managed by volunteers, we did not want complex hardware or software that would need to be administered. Therefore, we had to find a solution that was “in the cloud”.

How did you get involved in volunteer firefighting? Do you have a different day job?
About a year and a half ago, I was involved in a project with my day job (security official for the government) to modernize ambulance operations. As part of that job — and since I had no prior firefighting/EMS experience — I spent a week riding in an ambulance to understand how EMTs/Paramedics perform their duties. After that week, I was hooked so I signed up for the next available state training. One year later, I was a certified volunteer EMT for my home town of Myersville.

What’s the typical call that comes in to the VFC?
Actually, there is no such thing as a typical call. In a single day, we could have a cardiac arrest, a person on the highway who had trouble breathing, a major car accident, and someone who got sick from new medication. The next day, the only call could be for the firefighters to put out a car fire.

Mac or PC?
Whatever fits the need… My wife is a graphic designer, so we have PCs and a Mac at home. At the station, we have PCs and some Chromium OS installed, but the firefighters/EMTs bring in everything from PC laptops to handhelds/phones to tablet PCs. This is yet another reason why clientless OpenDNS works for us…

Interested in answering five questions for the OpenDNS Blog? Let us know!

In today’s installment of “Five Questions” we journey to the American South for a quick conversation with Senior Systems Engineer and OpenDNS fan Cameron Brister.

Tell us a little bit about where you work and why you use OpenDNS there…
I work as Senior Systems Engineer at SquarePlanIT in West Monroe, La. We specialize in Web design and development, graphic design, and managed IT solutions, among other things. We use OpenDNS at all of our client locations, and of course at our own office. We really like the flexibility that OpenDNS offers for web content filtering, as well as the reporting tools that are available.

What made you start using it in the first place? Were there specific issues you were trying to fix?
I started using OpenDNS at home after a good friend recommended it to me. He found it to be faster and more reliable than than the DNS offered by our ISP. I got the same results and was immediately hooked. It wasn’t long after that we started suggesting it to everyone!

Now onto the fun questions… Mac or PC?
Mac, definitely! I made the switch a couple of years ago and haven’t looked back!

If someone was going to block your top three time-wasting websites at work, what would they block?
Gizmodo.com, Facebook.com and Macrumors.com.

If you could buy one gadget or new toy (price is no object) what would you buy?
Being the Apple enthusiast that I am, I would buy the new Apple TV!

Interested in answering five questions for the OpenDNS Blog? Let us know!