Two weeks ago I was in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, doing an installation and am happy to report that as of today, that site is online and serving production OpenDNS traffic.

One of the neat things about OpenDNS is that we use something called Anycast technology in how we run our network. That’s great for you — it means no matter where you are in the world, your DNS requests route through our closest datacenter. When we do maintenance, our routing topology ensures you will route to our next closest datacenter. It also means that when we bring up a new datacenter that is closer to you, your DNS requests will go to it.

And here’s a photo of what our installation looks like:

From top to bottom we have:

• Operations machine for management
• Juniper MX480 Router
• Cisco 2950 Switch for management
• 3 SuperMicro Twin2U Servers (each with four servers in a single chassis)

This is a fairly typical setup for us. We have lots of room to add more servers as needed (though we think the 12 we have will be plenty for quite a while). We’re happy to answer questions, so please feel free to ask ‘em. You can see more pics of our setup here: OpenDNS in Amsterdam

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.

A few months ago we told you about a major milestone for the Domain Tagging system and the OpenDNS community - an impressive 5 million unique domains submitted into the system. And today I’m excited to tell you about another milestone. We officially now have 1 million domains verified in the system. That means they’ve been submitted, tagged, voted on and confirmed. (This is in addition to the millions of domains in the seven Adult categories from our friends at St. Bernard Software.)

When we introduced you to the Domain Tagging system, which powers our Web content filtering service, we explained it was better than any other filtering system for three reasons:

1. It’s more comprehensive. The system has more than 50,000 people submitting and voting on sites. This is in stark contrast to a mere handful of people employed for this job by security companies offering Web content filtering.

2. It’s faster-moving. New Web sites and changes to existing Web sites are constantly being published to the Internet. Other Web content filtering systems update only once nightly, or even less frequently, and therefore fail to catch and categorize everything right away. The OpenDNS community is always adding and tagging sites, so you benefit from real-time updates.

3. It’s free to use. No longer are you forced to pay top dollar to keep your network safe and secure.

I talk to you, our customers and our community, every day and hear how much you value a Web content filtering system that works reliably and keeps the people on your network safe online. Whether it’s businesses, school districts, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), hospitals or households, everyone appreciates the service our community powers and OpenDNS provides.

In the coming months, we’ll be working be working on improvements to the Domain Tagging System that encourage more voting. Perhaps even some prizes for the most active and accurate voters… But in honor of this milestone, take a few minutes today and vote on some domains.

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.

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)