SysAdmin Appreciation Day, which is one of our favorite holidays here in the office, is right around the corner. We did a bunch of cool stuff last year but this year we’re going all in and hosting a huge party honoring all you fine people who keep the Internets running.

If you’re local to San Francisco, we invite you to come celebrate with us. Register for a ticket here. The tickets are free, but we’ll be checking names at the door.

Since the timing is right we’re also celebrating the second birthday of OpenDNS. So even if you aren’t a SysAdmin, you are still welcome at our party. I hope to see you there!

Event details:

What: OpenDNS SysAdmin Day Celebration and Birthday
Date: July 23, 2008
Location: Fluid Ultra Lounge, San Francisco, CA
Time: 6 - 9 p.m.

Congratulations are in order today to CEO David Ulevitch.

It comes as no surprise to us, and probably you too, that David was named one of BusinessWeek magazine’s “Most Promising Entrepreneurs Under the Age of 30.” (Yes, he’s only 26.) You can read the entire feature here, but the gist is this: The BusinessWeek editorial staff gets together once a year and selects a handful of high-tech entrepreneurs that are clear standouts among their peers. These are people that are expected to do great things over the course of their careers - this year eleven people were awarded the honor.

Given where David has taken OpenDNS thus far and all the significant “firsts” OpenDNS is responsible for, I know BusinessWeek made the right decision including him.

OpenDNS is for everyone. And by everyone, I mean everyone; moms, dads, kids, nerds, jocks, etc. We recently found out that our use of a CAPTCHA meant we were excluding blind and visually impaired people from using portions of our service. Thanks to some quick coding by Cory, we had an audio version of the CAPTCHA launched to solve the problem.

I was surprised at how easy it was to implement and I’d encourage anyone who uses a CAPTCHA to consider offering an audio alternative. There is a huge population of Internet-savvy blind and visual impaired users on the Internet who are well worth your time and effort to accommodate. If you want help with doing this on your site, we’d be happy to show you how we did it.

We just served our 500,000,000,000th DNS request. In other words, a half trillion. Because of how we aggregate our stats and the volume in which we do them (many at the same time) we don’t know exactly what the 500 billionth request was. I’m sure it was a good one.

If I had to guess, it was probably someone looking up one of the best tech sites on the net, Digg.com or someone visiting one of the best new tech bloggers, Paul Stamatiou.

Update: Now that I think about it, it was probably someone buying a nice gift for their special someone over at Kathy Van Zeeland. (KVZ uses OpenDNS, of course)

TGIF.

Here at 199 Fremont Street we’re all exhaling a deep, collective sigh of relief. We’ve spent the last several weeks revamping every single page of our site to make it easier to use, and its fitting that we finished it on a Friday. Lots of you let us know how much you liked the original, and thank you very much for that. But I think you’re really gonna love the new one.

If you want to poke around, I recommend:

• The “How it Works” section. If you’ve ever wondered how we give you such a world-class DNS service, “How it Works” is your place.

• The “Features” section. Our service does a lot. The index page here gives you a snapshot of everything.

• The “Customers” section. Our customers cross both industries and continents and we’ve built this section so you can see just how diverse the group is. The main page has a few representative customers from each category, but be sure to click “view all.”

As always, we welcome your feedback and will read and consider anything you send our way.

What do you think of the new site?