This is my first blog post here at OpenDNS, though some of you may know me from answering your support emails. It is not unusual, however, for our own users to sit in the tech support seat themselves and offer help to others. Yesterday we received the following email, and I thought it was so good we should share it:

I’ve been studying abroad in the UK for three weeks and dealing with a crummy internet connection, but at least I had OpenDNS configured on my machine. This morning, the internet stopped working for everyone in the hotel… except me. It took me a bit to realize what had happened. Once I realized the Hotel’s ISP’s DNS was down, I spent the entire afternoon configuring OpenDNS on the laptops of everyone in the hotel lobby……we have to thank you for re-connecting us to the world, even across the pond!

Thanks for such an incredible service that anyone who understands networking would pay precious money for, yet you somehow provide it for free. It’s great to be immune to one of the most annoying internet problems you can have.

- Dominic

Thanks Dominic! While we are always happy to help, it is also nice when our users take the initiative to spread the word of OpenDNS and contribute positively to their community. After all, that is one of the ideas OpenDNS was founded upon.

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.

Both!

Today we announced that OpenDNS now has 3 million users. That’s a lot of people. It’s also roughly the number of people living in Los Angeles, CA according to the 2000 Census.

If you’re reading this you’re probably one of those 3 million OpenDNS users. You did a great thing for your network by enabling OpenDNS, the biggest AND fastest-growing DNS service in the world.

2008 is poised to be a big year. We’re working hard to bring all sorts of new features to your OpenDNS account - tools we know you’re gonna wonder how you ever lived without. (Hint: Look for Web content filtering to get better and better.) As always, if you have an idea for a way we can make the service better for you, don’t hesitate to pass it along. Chances are some of the other 2,999,999 OpenDNS users want the same thing.

Happy New Year everyone.

Wow! It’s only the 11th of the month and already 83 new schools have switched to OpenDNS!

In case you missed the initial announcement, October is Take OpenDNS to School month. That means we’re asking you to spread the word about OpenDNS to your kids’ school(s), your friends’ kids’ school(s) and any other school you’re affiliated with. Of course, I’m the first to say it’s not that hard of a sell… OpenDNS and schools are perfect together. Schools have restrictive budgets. OpenDNS is free. Schools have kids. OpenDNS has Web content filtering. See what I mean?

There are still 20 days left in the month, which is plenty of time to print this PDF and make sure it gets to everyone that can benefit.

OpenDNS customers are the best.

Yeah, we make your life easier with our 100% reliability and we save you time with super speedy browsing. We even keep you and yours safe with optional phishing protection. But often times it’s hard to quantify the amount of money we save you.

Not anymore, say our customers.

Since launching adult site blocking earlier this month, we’ve heard our free service is saving thousands of dollars for companies and organizations who would otherwise pay for a similar service that does the exact same thing - often not even as well as we do it.

This is great for companies, but even greater for schools and libraries with very limited technology budget, combined with regulations requiring filters to keep kids safe online. Like Jackson School District and Berkeley Public Libraries.

We’re glad we can provide you such an awesome service without exhausting your budget.