If you’re going to be at the 23rd annual Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference in Baltimore, MD next week — and we know many of you are — pencil us in for a couple things:

First OpenDNS Founder David Ulevitch will be leading a Birds-of-a-Feather session Monday night at 7 pm. The topic is “Best Practices in DNS” and David will discuss the state of the Domain Name System, past and present, benefits of integrating security into DNS, DNSSec and more.

Then at 8 pm on Monday night, join us across the street from the convention hall at James Joyce Pub for a happy hour (or two) hosted by OpenDNS. This is your opportunity to meet David personally and ask any questions you have — about DNS in general, configuring OpenDNS on your network or even who he likes in the World Series.

Both events are not to be missed. RSVP for the happy hour event so we know to expect you. Hope to see you there.

SmartCache is one of OpenDNS’s many significant innovations. We invented SmartCache — the technology that automatically locates and tries the last known good IP address for Web sites that are having authoritative DNS outages and are completely unreachable on the Internet as a result. SmartCache works to make those Web sites load for OpenDNS users who have SmartCache enabled, while they’re unreachable for everyone else. It’s this kind of innovation that we’re known for, and probably one of the reasons you choose our service.

When we introduced OpenDNS Deluxe and OpenDNS Enterprise last week, we put SmartCache in the “only available to subscribers” bucket of features. Any Basic (or free) users who had SmartCache enabled would keep there ability to manage the feature, but going forward it would only appear available to new paying subscribers. Many of you wrote in to express your concern about our decision: You made the case that SmartCache is core to our DNS service, and something that makes switching from your ISP’s DNS to OpenDNS very compelling.

So, starting about 10 minutes ago, users of all versions of OpenDNS get SmartCache for free. And I hope you turn it on, as it’s quite awesome.

Finally, it’s the only feature that was removed from the Basic, free service. We can now accurately say that nothing was removed from the Basic service when we launched our paid services and we won’t be ignoring the free service going forward either; we know a lot of you try the free version first and so you can bet that we will make sure it continues to be a world-class service.

If you use OpenDNS today, are a fan of us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter, you’ve been hearing about the pending availability of OpenDNS Deluxe and OpenDNS Enterprise for over a month. We didn’t give much detail about the new services but instead gave you a place to tell us if you’d be interested in a paid version of OpenDNS that has more features and no advertisements.

The feedback was overwhelming. And, your feedback helped shape the products we’ve released today.

Here’s what we’ve learned and tried to deliver:

• There is huge demand for a clean, premium DNS service. DNS is how people navigate the Internet — And, there is an audience that’s willing to pay for an ad-free version of what we already provide.
• Security services are too expensive and too complex. For parents at home, the UI for parental controls solutions should be powerful but easy to use. We work hard to expose the depth of features in a controlled way so users aren’t overwhelmed with choices. We’re not at Apple-status of simplicity yet, but we’re working on it. As for price, schools and businesses of all sizes simply looking to keep their users safe and their network secure should be able to manage filtering for multiple locations without consuming all of their IT budget.

OpenDNS Deluxe and OpenDNS Enterprise address these two points.

OpenDNS Deluxe is basically an ad-free version of the free service. It has some additional customization options, an increased whitelist, whitelist-only mode (which limits Web access on your network to only the sites in your whitelist and blocks everything else) and stores your network stats for up to a year, a big boost from the two weeks we store your stats now. We have priced a family pack version and a per-user version.

OpenDNS Enterprise is best for school districts and larger businesses. It gives you the ability to share OpenDNS management across a team, delegating read, write and grant privileges, and includes an audit log. It includes comprehensive malware site protection, daily reports about network stats delivered through email you can forward and share easily, and allows you to specify a custom URL for block page landings. It also stores your stats indefinitely. You can roll out OpenDNS across multiple locations without deploying an appliance at each site in a matter of minutes or hours.

There are a few very important things I’d like to clarify about this announcement, however. First and foremost, the free version you use and love today, what we’re calling OpenDNS Basic, is not going away. Ever. On the contrary it will continue to get better and better over time, with new features and functionality that are good for you, your users and the Internet. As we expand datacenters and our footprint, you’ll benefit from that, too. This is all being served on the same platform regardless of package.

Second, there’s some confusion around the Malware Site Protection feature, as it relates to all versions of OpenDNS. Here’s what’s happening: We will continue to block Internet-scale bots and dangerous websites that spread malware in the Basic and Deluxe versions, just as we’ve done with Conficker and the recent Microsoft Zero Day Exploit. We call this Basic Botnet / Malware Protection. The Malware Site Protection feature is different and brand new, never before offered, and is included in OpenDNS Enterprise. Similarly, we have an expanded list of botnet command and control sites currently only available in the Enterprise version. It’s our hope to be able to offer this down the product line over time, but for now it’s limited to Enterprise.

Today is an exciting day for us here at OpenDNS, and the new services are the culmination of lots of hard work from everyone on the OpenDNS team. We look forward to your feedback as our aim, very clearly, is to give you the features you want.

Today something very significant happened, but you could’ve missed it if you didn’t happen to read The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or PC Magazine. A group of Internet industry CEOs and Founders, myself included, came together to write a letter to U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Julius Genachowski, to express our support for his efforts around network neutrality.

Net neutrality is a cause that myself and OpenDNS as a company care deeply about. Before we came along and provided you with an alternative DNS service, everybody used their ISP or ran their own DNS server. Now we provide people with more choice and have demonstrated that a competitive DNS landscape is good for the Internet. It’s important that this competitive landscape be maintained and that network operators don’t do things that might cause them to block or prefer one type of traffic over another.

I urge you all to read the letter and get behind this great cause. I’ve embedded a copy of it below.

Today is a big day for OpenDNS. I’m thrilled to tell you we’ve listened to your feedback and are giving you what you want: two new versions of OpenDNS designed to meet the unique needs of professional users and businesses of all sizes.

OpenDNS has had tremendous success in our quest to improve the Internet since we launched the service three years ago — To make it safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. Our users come from all over the world and reflect a diverse set of people. Our users have homes with children, they’re some of the country’s largest school districts - Baltimore and Detroit public school systems to name a few - and they’re businesses of all sizes, from mom and pop shops to some of the world’s most trusted, global brands.

On the consumer front, we are seeing more and more users start using our service through our fantastic partners like NETGEAR and we’ve also just released a new OpenDNS Dynamic Updater client to help make it easier to ensure you are using OpenDNS at all times.

But there are some features that businesses need that aren’t included in the classic version of OpenDNS you are using today. And that’s where OpenDNS Deluxe and OpenDNS Enterprise come in. The new services have features that are tailored for both a savvier “prosumer” customer as well as larger businesses. They include a wide variety of customizations and new features that help us better integrate into more complex networks and organizations. And, they come with one of our most requested “features,” the option to easily remove the advertisements (and wildcard NXDOMAIN) from the OpenDNS experience. An option that fits in with our goal of providing people the best DNS experience possible, however they choose to configure and experience it.

Here at OpenDNS headquarters in San Francisco the entire engineering team is working in some capacity on making these services great, while working on making our classic service even better. In fact, we’ve built out even more infrastructure and more capacity, something that will benefit everyone using OpenDNS as a whole.

Today, we have 25 customers currently using our new services in Early Access, and the services will be Generally Available to anyone later this year.

I personally invite anyone who’s interested in the new service to apply for Early Access by filling out a form we’ve put online here.

Feedback welcomed in the comments, as always.