How do you understand big numbers?

OpenDNS does ~3 billion DNS requests daily, with around 450 billion all-time so far. Big numbers, but tough to comprehend.

Recently, we changed the stats number at the top of every page of our website from the all-time number to requests/per second. This number moves around, but recently has swung between 37,000 - 41,000 requests per second.

OK… sounds impressive, but again, what should you compare the number to?

How about the volume of transactions on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)?

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal ran “After Crash, NYSE Got the Message(s)” on the front page of the Money & Investing section (C1 in print).

In reading the article (in case it’s not available when you click… WSJ.com requires payment at some point), we learn:

On Feb. 27, 2007, messages flowed in at a rate of 15,000 per second. The exchange quickly thereafter doubled its capacity to 38,000 messages a second. As markets fell in August when credit markets seized up, the NYSE was getting as many as 28,000 messages per second. This time, systems held up without a major hitch, but the volume of messages prompted [NYSE CEO]Mr. Thain to call for an increase in capacity to 64,000 by year’s end. [Emphasis added]

So, even at its top volume in August, the NYSE volume of messages wasn’t matching the volume of DNS requests our customers make each day. And its capacity currently falls short of ours.

Maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges, but we like to think that your DNS requests are as important (almost?!) as those buy-sell messages.

OpenDNS has plenty of headroom, and we’re adding more to support our growing customer base… and to stay ahead of the NYSE!

Earlier today, OpenDNS resolved its 300,000,000,000th DNS request. That’s two months after hitting 200 billion, and five months after resolving our first 100 billion. In the past two weeks, we’ve been resolving more than 2 billion requests daily (stats).

All of us want to thank our customers for making OpenDNS the world’s largest and fastest-growing DNS service. With zero downtime (system status).

Our users tell us they want power and intelligence. Or rather, our users want intelligence about their network and the power to make changes.

Today we’re taking it up a notch, turning your OpenDNS Account into a comprehensive Dashboard which gives you a more precise understanding of your DNS traffic. The ability to gain insight into your DNS traffic and then have the tools to act without needing to install any software or buy any appliances is a huge win that every IT administrator in the world will enjoy. On top of that, it’s completely free.

Until today, we had a rudimentary (and rickety by our standards) stats system that would show you only a birds-eye view of your data. For instance, you could view a top-line number of total DNS requests and your top 10 domains per day. If you wanted to know the 11th domain, you were out of luck.

Want to know how many DNS requests you are doing each day? Want to know what your top domains are? Want to block sites easily all in an intuitive interface? Done, done and done. Now, you can get the count of every domain looked up on your network, over any period of time. View the data as a chart, a table or drop a CSV file into Excel. This is your data.

I like to think that the OpenDNS Dashboard is like Google Analytics for your DNS.

In the coming days and weeks you will see the Dashboard grow in functionality as we offer more ways to interpret your data. For those concerned about any privacy implications related to this new launch, I’d encourage you to read our post. Learn how we’re now storing less data about our users than ever before and giving you full control over what data we keep.

Thanks to our new Dashboard, OpenDNS is the rock solid, reliable DNS that is safer, faster, smarter and now gives you near-real-time statistics and trends about what’s happening with your network. Let us know what you think!

Yesterday, OpenDNS resolved its 200,000,000,000th request. That’s 200 billion with a b.

Thank you to our many customers for making OpenDNS the world’s largest and fastest-growing DNS service. It’s been less than 3 months since we responded to the 100 billionth request. We’ve averaged more than 1 billion requests/day for that period. On Thursday, OpenDNS responded to 1.4 billion DNS requests (stats).

All that, with zero downtime (system status), thanks to multiple servers spread across five geographically distributed locations connected by multiple Tier 1 telco providers to deliver an amazingly fast, reliable Internet experience no matter the size of your network.

Come on in! Get started.

The magic numbers:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

We made a couple small changes to improve the way you view stats in your OpenDNS account.

1. The default stats view now shows all stats on a single page.
2. On the top of that page, you’ll see a link to a printer-friendly version.

More stats coming this summer

These are minor enhancements, but it gives me an opportunity to mention a larger project underway which will give you more granular statistics, more detailed charts, and more control over your data.

Ever wonder how many typos are corrected per day on your network? What kinds of DNS traffic you send to the Internet? The most-used shortcuts? You’ll be able to answer those questions very soon.

What other stats would you like to see? Post your ideas here.