The team here has been hard at work over the past few months getting a new datacenter set up, and I’m happy to report that as of today, our Singpore datacenter is online and serving production OpenDNS traffic. The Singapore server marks our 12th datacenter globally and the first of a number planned for Asia.

One of the benefits of OpenDNS is that we use a technique called Anycast routing in how we run our network. Anycast means that no matter where you are in the world, your DNS requests route through our closest datacenter. And when we do maintenance that requires us to take a site offline, 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 automatically start routing to it. So for the bulk of our users in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, India and throughout Asia, this new Singapore datacenter promises an even faster Internet.

And here’s a photo of what our installation looks like as it was being racked:

This Singapore datacenter is only the start. We’re planning on adding a new datacenter in Frankfurt, Germany in early 2011. After that, the plan is to continue expanding our footprint from there. As always, you can take a look at our global system status on our Systems page.

PS — Internet routing is not a perfect science and requires a lot of work to get right. If you are in Asia and a traceroute doesn’t show you talking to Singapore for DNS we want to know! Please send a traceroute from your computer to 208.67.222.222 to our support department so we can see which networks in Asia aren’t seeing our new routes.

On Thursday of last week, The New York Times consumer tech columnist David Pogue began his weekly piece with the words, “I’m about to make your life better. No need to thank me.” He went on to write a glowing review of OpenDNS, recommending that all his readers use it to improve their online experience.

This story — along with customers helping to get the word out about OpenDNS through tell-a-friend emails, Twitter and Facebook — helped fuel the biggest growth week in OpenDNS’ four-year history. Account creations were up nearly seven times their average and OpenDNS Deluxe has its best sales day ever. Not to mention the sales team absolutely killing it, adding Fortune 100 companies, household-brand retail chains and large K-12 school districts to the roster of happy OpenDNS Enterprise customers.

Some other interesting stats from last week:

• Pageviews on OpenDNS.com sykrocketed by several multiples.
• DNS queries hit the highest consistent levels ever; just shy of 27 billion per day.
• More than 1,000 individual tweets and retweets about OpenDNS in the two days after the article was published

The growth we’ve seen in the past week is tremendously gratifying. That said, there’s no resting in sight — we’re looking forward to welcoming more new customers, implementing more of your ideas, advancing the state-of-the-art in the DNS and security fields, and working to make OpenDNS an even better service than it is today. Thanks again for your support!

When OpenDNS launched PhishTank four years ago in Oct. 2006, we knew several things:

• We wanted to make a clearinghouse for phishing data.
• We wanted the data to be available for free to other services via an API.
• There was no existing common source of phishing data that was fast-moving, accurate and reliable.

Today I’m excited to announce that the 1 millionth phish has been submitted to PhishTank. The “winning” submission was a fake Citibank UK website, which was quickly verified by the PhishTank community.

Thank you to the thousands of security pros, researchers, academics and concerned Internet users for their contributions to PhishTank. It’s you who have made this possible. You’ve protected tens of millions of people around the world, lending your expertise to help take the guesswork out of identifying phishing scams. It’s a credit to the community that we’ve reached this milestone. And in doing so, we’ve together helped protect not only people who use OpenDNS, but millions more, since the phishing scams reported and verified are also blocked by all of the Internet services PhishTank shares the data with.

As we look toward the next 1 million submissions to PhishTank (happening even more quickly), we know it’s just as important today as it was when we launched in 2006 to ensure that PhishTank continues to be the comprehensive data source companies like Yahoo and Mozilla have come to rely on. The community is an extremely important part of this, so part of recognizing the 1 million phishes milestone is recognizing the people who’ve put in the hard work.

The other part is, of course, the technology that keeps PhishTank running. Over the past two weeks we’ve begun deploying all new hardware for PhishTank’s infrastructure. And, in the coming months, we’ll devote increased engineering resources to it, as well. The goal is that these enhancements and investments will make PhishTank easier to use for the community of dedicated submitters and verifiers, and also faster-moving for the companies and organizations pulling data out.

Did you see anything interesting online last month? Between blog posts, gaming sites, Facebook updates and breaking news, there was a lot to take in. One thing you probably didn’t see — if you are on an OpenDNS-protected network — were Phishing attempts.

Since we block these scammy and fraudulent Web sites, you might not realize how prevalent they are across the Internet. In July alone, we blocked almost one million phishing attempts. That’s how many times people on OpenDNS-protected networks saw the “phishing attempt blocked” page.

Even with the work we do to make sure you’re protected from seeing phishing sites, we can’t always catch everything. If you ever see a Web site or receive an email and aren’t sure if it’s legitimate, we’ve got you covered:

Five Easy Ways to Spot A Phishing Attempt

• Poor resolution: Phishing websites are often poor in quality, since they are created with urgency and have a short lifespan. If the resolution on a logo or in text strikes you as poor, be suspicious.
• Forged URL: Even if a link has a name you recognize somewhere in it, it doesn’t mean it links to the real organization. Read URLs from right to left — the real domain is at the end of the URL. Also, websites where it is safe to enter personal information begin with “https” — the “s” stands for secure. If you don’t see “https” do not proceed. Look out for URLs that begin with an IP address, such as: http://12.34.56.78/firstgenericbank/account-update/ — these are likely phishes.
• Generic greeting: Phishing emails are usually sent in large batches. To save time, Internet criminals use generic names like “First Bank Customer” so they don’t have to type all recipients’ names out and send emails one-by-one.
• Requests personal information: The point of sending phishing email is to trick you into providing your personal information. If you receive an email requesting your personal information, it is probably a phishing attempt.
• Sense of urgency: Internet criminals want you to provide your personal information now. They do this by making you think something has happened that requires you to act fast. The faster they get your information, the faster they can move on to another victim.

As always, we’re going to continue working on finding ways to improve the Internet and make it safer and smarter for our customers. For now, happy [and safe] surfing — and if you have a friend who could use protection from online phishing attempts, let them know about OpenDNS.

It’s hard to believe, but it was four years ago this month that OpenDNS launched. Just a short time into our quest to make the world’s Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, we’ve grown into the world’s largest DNS provider and achieved some unprecedented milestones. Our growth is largely attributable to people like you spreading the word about our service and introducing others to a better DNS, and we can’t thank you enough for that.

Just a few of the our milestones:

• A full one percent of all Internet users in the world — more than 18 million people globally — are using OpenDNS.
• One out of every three public K-12 schools in the U.S. uses OpenDNS, including some of the country’s largest school districts in the largest cities, like Baltimore, Detroit and San Diego.
• Just shy of 1 million phishes submitted to the PhishTank, the free community Web site where anyone can submit, verify, track and share phishing data. (Help us hit the 1 million landmark — submit a phish here.)
• A staggering 26+ billion DNS queries per day.

And of course, we’ve accomplished all of this with zero downtime, making the Internet more reliable than ever before for all of our users.

We’re going to be celebrating our birthday on Twitter over the next week by giving away four prizes (for our fourth birthday) every day. What kind of stuff are we talking about? Prizes include free home subscriptions for OpenDNS Deluxe, stylish OpenDNS t-shirts, goodie bags with awesome OpenDNS merch, and more!

Participating is simple — the easiest way to enter is to follow OpenDNS on Twitter and then retweet this post:

OpenDNS.com turns 4 this month! Giving away 4 prizes daily to celebrate. Follow @OpenDNS & RT this to enter! #OpenDNS4

Or, simply start following @OpenDNS and then tell your followers why they should use OpenDNS, too. Include #OpenDNS4 to have your tweets included in the contest. Each tweet is a separate entry, so feel free to enter more than once. We’ll pick daily winners randomly from all who enter, and we’ll follow up with you on Twitter if you’re a winner!

Yesterday we hit a milestone big enough and important enough to share. In just 24 hours we successfully answered more than 20 billion (!) DNS queries, doubling the number we handle per day since April of this year when we announced 10 billion.

Why is this important? Because our rapid and steady growth is an indication of the demand for a rock-solid reliable and intelligent DNS service that not only makes your Internet faster and more reliable, but safer and smarter too. We now have more than 15 million users around the world. More than 25,000 schools in the U.S. choose OpenDNS to keep their kids safe online, and included in that number are some of the country’s largest school districts. Companies ranging from small mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 100 enterprises are switching in droves to OpenDNS for Web content filtering, DNS security and DNS resolution.

2009 was an exceptional year for OpenDNS, but the next year is poised to be even better. In 2010 we’ll be adding more server locations and more server capacity to make our international coverage even better. We’ll give you new features that allow more customization of how OpenDNS works for you. And, we’ll work hard to keep DNS innovation synonymous with OpenDNS.

Thanks for helping us get to 20 billion. I’m confident 50 billion is closer than it may seem.

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.