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.

We launched Forums today for you to provide a venue to discuss the world of OpenDNS. This isn’t a weak attempt to get rid of support but is a new way for our users to communicate with us and each other. We are focused on delivering the best experience possible we know that in order to do that we have to hear from you.

OpenDNS will continue to respond to its users in all the current ways: email, IM, blogs and comments, phone, and (occasionally!) in person. But every time one of us answers a question for an individual customer, we’ve wanted to share that tip, lesson, or workaround with a broader audience. Forums let us do that…and Forums will be a great place for OpenDNS users to share with each other, too.

Our short-term goals are to learn more about specific situations we already know need more attention, like instructions for setting DNS on a Samsung Blackjack phone or learning whether or not WildBue satellite broadband customers can use OpenDNS or not (reports vary).

Of course, we’ll also answer questions there so that others can benefit from the answers. Longer term, we expect to find out where our users want us to go.

A free OpenDNS account is required to post, to limit noise. Your OpenDNS account is also useful for preferences, statistics, and dynamic DNS support.

Please join in at http://forums.opendns.com/ and let us know what you think.

We get lots of email, everyday, from our customers. Most of the emails are similar in topic – someone asking how to use OpenDNS with their setup. But every once in a while an email comes through that’s so touching we pass it around the office. The below note from Caio, a customer in Brazil, is that kind of email.

He wrote us not because he had a problem, but rather just to say thanks, for saving his job.

It’s this sort of reinforcement that makes me love what I do. We all need the Internet and I get to work with a team that makes it more reliable — saving people time, frustration and in this case, their job.

Caio gave me permission to share his email.

To: contact@opendns.com
From: caio@xxxxx.com
Subject: Thank you


Hello,

I’m just happy that I found a free service like this on the Internet.

I live in Brazil and sometimes my default DNS fails, then I can’t connect to the Internet. I’m a trainee and I work in a hardware store and my job is half in the office and half in my house. When I’m home I need to make tables about what we have sold on everyday using MS Office Excel. Today my DNS wasn’t working and a DNS fail means a layoff for me. I figured it was a DNS problem because Firefox was unable to open any page but, when I tried to open a page by its IP, nothing wrong happens.

I used OpenDNS and it saved me by allowing me to connect and send to my boss. This is how OpenDNS saved my job.

Thank You. I’m really loving it.

-Caio

Happy holidays everyone.

OpenDNS note: Mike was one of our first users. He turned us on way back in July!

Mike Lucas
Professional Geek

OpenDNS: How did you first learn what DNS stands for?

ML: Hard to remember exactly when. I’ve been very interested in working with computers for over ten years now. I will admit though that up until maybe just a year or two ago, I never put much thought into the performance of the DNS servers that I used. I always just used the ones provided to me by my ISP, without knowing I had choices in the DNS servers I used, or that there were better ones out there.

OpenDNS: What improvements has OpenDNS made to your Internet experience?

ML: Faster DNS lookup times, and the reliability of the DNS servers, would be the most immediate and noticeable improvement. My ISP that I get my cable modem service from has been growing greatly over the last several years, and over the last year especially has been adding new customers at an extraordinary rate. Maybe about 6 to 8 months ago I first started to experience problems with my ISP’s DNS servers. I started repeatedly receiving failed DNS lookups to websites that I knew to be working. I didn’t narrow the problem down to DNS for a few days really, and only did after I had eliminated the possibility of it being a new Firefox bug or a wrong setting in my network somewhere. I finally realized the problem was in fact my ISP’s DNS servers as it was only occurring at peak times, at nights and on weekends, times when the majority of my ISP’s customers were all online, and the DNS servers were being overloaded. I first started using a local network DNS program called TreewalkDNS to resolve the issue, which did eliminate my problems, and then several months later I read a news story on CNET about the launching of OpenDNS. The same day I uninstalled TreewalkDNS to give OpenDNS a try, and have never switched back.

OpenDNS: What advice would you offer to other geeks considering switching to OpenDNS?

ML: Just give it a try. It’s very easy to start using, OpenDNS.com provides very easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, with pictures even, on how to start using OpenDNS on all operating systems and in hardware routers. There’s no software to install, so operating system compatibility is not even an issue. The instructions are very easy to follow even for an average or even sub-average computer user. You will more then likely notice the difference immediately, and if not, you can just switch back to your ISP’s DNS servers at any time. But once you try OpenDNS, you won’t be switching back.

OpenDNS: Is OpenDNS really “Safer, Faster and Smarter” like we claim?

ML: Absolutely. Not only is OpenDNS more reliable then my ISP’s DNS servers, it is considerably faster. I achieve faster DNS lookups using OpenDNS then I did even while using TreewalkDNS. It has made every part of my internet use faster, from web browsing to instant messaging to anti-virus updates. And it is definitely safer as well. The latest versions of both Firefox and Internet Explorer now have built-in phishing protection, but these rely on an internet server to provide the list of known phishing websites. OpenDNS’s filtering of known phishing sites at the DNS level is smarter, because it can not go down without your entire DNS going down too, which has never happened. Not even once in all my time using OpenDNS. And it is also faster in this area, connecting to one server for both your DNS and your phishing protection and at the same time. Without a doubt, OpenDNS is safer, is faster, and is smarter.

OpenDNS: What’s the hardest part about being a geek?

ML: People automatically assuming I can fix any problem with their computer no matter what it is – and do it quickly. Anyone with experience fixing computers knows this is not always the case, but I try my best.