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.

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?

The Internet is a big place and even with the best filtering you will eventually stumble upon a site you wish you could just “un-see.” Unfortunately, we can’t erase that mental picture from your mind, but we can let you help protect others from the same experience.

When you stumble across a site you think should be blocked by one of our 6 categories of adult site blocking, let us know. Head on over to the adult domain checker, enter the domain of the site, and click the “Check this site” button. If there is no match against the St. Bernard iGuard database, you will be given the opportunity to submit it for human review.

You can even consider it your good deed for the day.

It’s a Friday and it’s warm out. So naturally I’m heading to a datacenter with George to go rack some gear. Before I head out, I wanted to do a quick post and let people know that we’ve expanded our testimonials page a bit and would love to get more feedback on there.

Lots of you write into support and tell us how much you enjoy OpenDNS or how it’s helped you out, which is awesome. I want to share those comments with the world. If you head over to the testimonials page and add some feedback in the box on the right we’ll approve it and it’ll be one of the hundreds (soon to be thousands I’m hoping) that scrolls by on our homepage.

For those of you who are bloggers, we already showcase your coverage over here.

Have a great weekend!

Please read our post about Google and Dell and then ask the really technical questions here. This way we don’t have to annoy our regular users with the technical details of how we’re doing our URL redirections.

I’ll do my best to always keep this blog post updated with the answers to your questions. Your questions can be about our architecture, our reasons, or anything else you feel like asking in regards to this issue.