On Thursday of last week, The New York Times consumer tech columnist David Pogue began his weekly piece with the words, “I’m about to make your life better. No need to thank me.” He went on to write a glowing review of OpenDNS, recommending that all his readers use it to improve their online experience.

This story — along with customers helping to get the word out about OpenDNS through tell-a-friend emails, Twitter and Facebook — helped fuel the biggest growth week in OpenDNS’ four-year history. Account creations were up nearly seven times their average and OpenDNS Deluxe has its best sales day ever. Not to mention the sales team absolutely killing it, adding Fortune 100 companies, household-brand retail chains and large K-12 school districts to the roster of happy OpenDNS Enterprise customers.

Some other interesting stats from last week:

• Pageviews on OpenDNS.com sykrocketed by several multiples.
• DNS queries hit the highest consistent levels ever; just shy of 27 billion per day.
• More than 1,000 individual tweets and retweets about OpenDNS in the two days after the article was published

The growth we’ve seen in the past week is tremendously gratifying. That said, there’s no resting in sight — we’re looking forward to welcoming more new customers, implementing more of your ideas, advancing the state-of-the-art in the DNS and security fields, and working to make OpenDNS an even better service than it is today. Thanks again for your support!

We’re always working to make OpenDNS even easier to use, and we’re happy to roll out some improvements today that make accessing all of the features and statistics you rely on even easier. Users logging in to their OpenDNS Dashboard today might notice a few cosmetic changes: we’ve added a new “Home” tab that neatly summarizes all the networks you’ve added to your OpenDNS account and serves as a launching pad for making settings changes or viewing statistics for those networks quickly.

All of the features and settings you’ve come to expect from OpenDNS are still there, and they’re all in the same places you used to access them. We’ve just added a new homepage that makes accessing those parts of the Dashboard a little bit faster.

We’ve rolled out one other change to our community pages today as well. When you visit our blog, forums, IdeaBank, or other community pages for the first time, you’ll be prompted via a pop-up window to choose a display name, if you haven’t made that choice already in the My Account tab of your Dashboard. This change allows users who signed up for OpenDNS with their email address as their username to keep their email address private while interacting with the OpenDNS community. Here’s what it will look like when you are prompted to pick a display name:

If you haven’t yet, login to your OpenDNS Dashboard and check out the facelift. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Today we made two announcements, each very significant to all OpenDNS users. Here’s an overview to get everyone up to speed on what OpenDNS has cooked up.

The first announcement is about the comeback – and improvement – of the much-loved and anticipated Stats System. Stats are invaluable to network administrators: they give you insight into what’s happening on your network coupled with the tools to do something about it. The old system, which was overloaded and barely processing our nearly 9 billions DNS queries per day, was down for awhile as we made improvements. Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to take three steps forward. Thanks to everyone for your patience as we got it back up and running. I hope you’ll find it was worth the wait.

New functionality in the Stats System includes the comeback of the Top Domains report. This feature gives you a list of the top Web sites visited from your network and affords you unique insight into where your resources are being consumed, and which inappropriate or unsafe websites people are seeing. Top Domains now integrates directly with our Web content filtering system. This means you can look at Top Domains, see something you want blocked and block either the site or the category it fits into with a single click. (Example: Facebook.com is one of your Top Domains. Without leaving that screen you can block with Facebook.com or “Social Networks.”) Check out this screencast, narrated by the engineer who built it, Richard Crowley, to see the new system in action.

The second announcement is significant to all OpenDNS users as well as the entire Internet community. Today we’ve rolled out a way for you to see if Conficker is living on your network. The Conficker worm, also called Downadup and Kido, is massive. Some estimates of how many PCs are compromised are as high as 10 million. What’s interesting about this particular virus is that it uses the Domain Name System in a unique way: Conficker contains an algorithm that checks 250 new domains per day for instructions on what it should do. This puts us in a unique position to keep you safe since we’re in the unique position of providing insight and intelligence into your DNS service. We’ve teamed with Kaspersky Lab to identify those 250 daily domains, and stop resolving them. This means if you’re using OpenDNS, Conficker will do your network no damage. Yet another reason for your friends and colleagues to make the switch. While OpenDNS represents just a tiny drop in the sea of the Internet users today, we think this is a smart move forward.

To find out if Conficker has penetrated your network, simply log in to your account and select Stats on the left sidebar. From there choose Blocked Domains and filter “only domains blocked as malware.” This will generate a list of malware sites your network has attempted to connect with.

This is just the beginning, folks. We’ve got a year’s worth of new features we’re cranking hard on to make your network better performing and more secure. Stay tuned…

We’re launching a powerful new feature today. We are giving you the power to block specific websites. That means you can protect your computer, your house, your office and anything else that uses DNS from being able to service domains that you don’t want to load. Oh, and best of all: This service is totally free.

When customers started to ask for this feature we wondered who would want this. The geeks here in the office remarked that this kind of blocking would be trivial with a Linux server and some proxy/filtering software installed. Then it quickly dawned on us. (Eureka!) It’s not just mom and dad at home who have no easy way to just block an individual domain with any ease but it’s also network administrators at offices. Network administrators can now block problem domains for their entire office in a simple way without having to pay 1000′s of dollars in new hardware and time to achieve similar functionality. Does your ISP’s DNS server let you do this?

Blocking domains is really easy. Here’s how you do it:

1. Sign in to your OpenDNS account and make sure you have a network configured.
2. Go to the Networks tab in your account and click on the Settings icon () for your network.
3. Click on the Blocked domains link and add a domain to be blocked.

You can delete or edit blocked domains on that same page. When you block a domain you block what is technically called a “zone.” This means it also blocks all sub-domains. Here’s an example. If you block craigslist.org then you’ll also be blocking la.craigslist.org (Craigslist Los Angeles) and sfbay.craigslist.org (Craigslist San Francisco), etc. If, instead, you just blocked newyork.craigslist.org then the rest of the Craigslist properties would load just fine.

When you try to visit a domain that is blocked in your network you’ll see a page that looks like this:

Since this is your network, we will show your logo on the blocked page, just as we do on the Guide pages. What? You haven’t uploaded your own logo yet? Go do it now, and go block some domains!

Let us know what you think!

We made a couple small changes to improve the way you view stats in your OpenDNS account.

1. The default stats view now shows all stats on a single page.
2. On the top of that page, you’ll see a link to a printer-friendly version.

More stats coming this summer

These are minor enhancements, but it gives me an opportunity to mention a larger project underway which will give you more granular statistics, more detailed charts, and more control over your data.

Ever wonder how many typos are corrected per day on your network? What kinds of DNS traffic you send to the Internet? The most-used shortcuts? You’ll be able to answer those questions very soon.

What other stats would you like to see? Post your ideas here.

This week, www.opendns.com got a makeover. It’s not drastic. Maybe you didn’t notice. But we’re doing three things differently now.

1. The site changes subtly if you’re using OpenDNS already.
2. The accounts system got a thorough review and upgrade.
3. We streamlined navigation, words and choices throughout.

Reacting differently

In key places, you’ll get a different choice based on whether you are using OpenDNS or not.

Homepage before setting up OpenDNS

Homepage after setting up OpenDNS

Improving accounts usability

There were some things which just didn’t work perfectly, so we fixed them. We also asked several of you for feedback, and got some helpful ideas. Thanks! In the end, we re-created the entire section. Sign in and look around.

Here’s a list of the changes in Accounts:

• New navigation throughout My Account and easier labeling for your networks.
• Custom images and Public announcements (aka, branding) are now enabled for all networks, all accounts. Fun!
• Upload a custom image in multiple formats and crop it in a nifty tool to the required size.
• Upload a custom image once; choose it for multiple networks.
• Upload up to 14 custom images per account; pick and choose per network.
• Accounts now support global preferences.

We’ll do individual posts exploring many of these new capabilities. They deserve it.

When less is more

We re-thought our tabs. At Home and At Work are now simply Get Started, since everyone enjoys the core benefits of OpenDNS. We still recognize that network managers have extra considerations when thinking about DNS.

Separately, our users now tell you, in their own words, why OpenDNS works for them. You can join them!

Please let us know what you think of the changes, either commenting here, posting in our forums, or via email.

As promised, account-less preferences were removed just now. I trust the three previous reminders did the trick, but if you have any concerns, please let us know. A free, secure account fully replaces the old preferences and opens up a lot more control and information to you. Get one now.

Told you once. Told you twice. This is the last time.

Once again, if you’ve been using account-less prefs, time to get a free account… now. This only affects a small group of people, since OpenDNS delivers a safer, faster, smarter, and more reliable Internet experience with or without an account.

But trust me that an account is going to give you even more control over your Internet experience very soon.