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.

We celebrated in San Francisco last night (and thanks to all who made it out - we had a blast and hope you did, too!) but the official System Administrator Appreciation Day is actually tomorrow — Friday, July 31. We’re doing our part to make sure the holiday gets the attention is deserves, but also know your boss probably doesn’t know about it. That changes this year.

Sign up for our free SysAdmin Day Boss Reminding Service. The email your boss will get will look like this. But sign up quickly because we’re sending the emails at 2:30 pm PST!

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.

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.

Today we announced one of the most significant DNS innovations of the last 25 years. SmartCache, our new DNS record-handling technology, renders frustrating authoritative DNS outages irrelevant for OpenDNS users. It’s both incredibly simple and invaluable to Internet users.

Here’s how it works: When an authoritative DNS provider suffers an outage, all of the Web sites it provides service to are taken offline. They’re inaccessible for everyone on the Internet. But no longer for OpenDNS users. Our servers will now immediately look for the last known good address for the site in our caches, and use that to load the site. So effectively OpenDNS users will be able to access Web sites that appear down for everyone else. For our millions of users at businesses, schools and libraries around the world, saving them Internet access interruptions and the time they waste is invaluable.

Authoritative DNS outages happen frequently and can be a big problem. Just a few weeks ago, it’s reported that major authoritative DNS provider UltraDNS suffered an outage that took Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and Petco.com offline for several hours. In such a case, SmartCache would fix the inaccessibility problem and allow people to visit the sites through the outage.

This is just the latest in a long series of DNS innovations we’ve developed and passed on to you. Most recently it was blocking the Conficker worm from phoning home. By blocking the domain names the worm used, we were and continue to be able to protect people around the globe. Trust that we’re committed to continue to innovate and give you easy-to-use services that make your Internet experience better.

SmartCache is available immediately as an opt-in feature. Just log in to your dashboard and look for the check box in your Advanced Settings. For those tech geeks, this only applies to queries where the authoritative server hands back a SERVFAIL response code in addition to any query that simply goes unanswered.

Let us know what you think of the new feature in the comments here.

Here at OpenDNS we’ve spent the past several months working to keep you safe from the Conficker worm. Using the OpenDNS service is widely considered to be one of the easiest and most guaranteed ways to protect your network. And today we roll out a free Conficker detection tool to give you actionable insight into whether or not you have Conficker on your network.

As David mentioned here, we’re in a unique position as your DNS provider of choice to block the worm at the DNS level and prevent it from phoning home. We’re also in a unique position to tell you, based on DNS queries coming from your account, if your network has been infected with Conficker. Log into your OpenDNS account now and you’ll see a banner indicating you either have Conficker or you don’t. This is a tremendously valuable service, and representative of a key innovation on the DNS. If you have friends or colleagues not using OpenDNS yet, we urge you to recommend the service.

Even though we prevent the worm from phoning home, we advise everyone with Conficker to run the disinfection tool. Microsoft offers a great one here.

Also today we’re sharing data about geographic distribution of the worm’s C-varient to date. This information is based on OpenDNS data alone, so is not necessarily representative of overall geographic Conficker distribution.

We’ll continue blocking Conficker for all of our users, through our on-by-default Botnet Protection feature. And we’ll keep you posted with updates about the virus, if/when we have them, on this blog.

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…

Just a friendly reminder that the “OpenDNS for Schools: Free and Efficient Web filtering for students” webinar is this Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 11 AM PST. It’s free to everyone who wants to attend, so be sure to invite friends and colleagues who aren’t using OpenDNS yet.

The event, hosted by Founder David Ulevitch, will answer all of your questions about OpenDNS in a K-12 school environment. Here’s the description:

K-12 schools make student security on the Internet a top priority. Learn how to use OpenDNS to enable free Web content filtering and security for students, achieve CIPA compliance, set up OpenDNS in minutes without the need for expensive hardware appliances, as well as how OpenDNS differs from competitive offerings.

We like our webinars short and sweet, so this one will be just 30 minutes in length. And no worries if you can’t tune in live - we’ll have a recorded version posted to the site after Wednesday.

Invite friends and register here. See you Wednesday!

UPDATE: Watch the recorded webinar here.