Yesterday marked another milestone in OpenDNS’s history; we served our 100 billionth DNS request. I remember how excited we were to serve 1 billion DNS requests in our first month. Compare that to yesterday where we served 1,071,072,782 queries in a single day.

This milestone is also a good time to point out that our DNS service has had zero downtime since the day it launched. We put up a system status website a couple weeks after we launched to show you just how reliable we are.

Or put simply…

And growing…

P.S. Some of you have asked what the 100 billionth DNS request was. Since we have five locations and we process stats in large aggregates every few minutes it is hard to tell. If we had to guess, we’re pretty sure it was either for TechCrunch or Digg.

Today is a big milestone for OpenDNS. We served over 500,000,000 DNS requests in a single day. It seems like just yesterday that we hit 4 billion queries total and 100,000,000 queries per day. That’s child’s play these days.

If you’ve liked us in 2006, you’re going to love us in 2007. We’ve got some really fantastic technologies coming together that are going to continue to make the Internet a sweeter place to be (and it’s pretty sweet already).



Now if only I had a dollar for every DNS query…

See the new tab up there, at the far right? It says My Account. Go ahead and take a look. Or read on for why you’ll want to create a free account. You can find the tab and Sign In link at the upper right of every page of the OpenDNS website.

OpenDNS invited the public to use its free, reliable DNS service for the first time on July 10, 2006. Less than a week later, we introduced preferences for OpenDNS, which gave the individual user the opportunity to manage their DNS in a way that had never before been possible. Later, at customer request, we used our platform to offer choice in their response to Cameroon’s TLD policies.

OpenDNS Accounts represents the next step in our commitment to give our customers choice and control.

We talk a lot about “Safer, Faster and Smarter” DNS built on a rock-solid and reliable foundation. A big part of being safer and smarter means giving you control. That’s what OpenDNS Accounts is all about.

When was the last time your DNS improved?

It doesn’t matter if you have one IP at home that you manage or a massive network of disconnected offices — OpenDNS Accounts is for you.

Secure
Registration, sign in, and all profile and preferences are managed with a username and password on a secure, encrypted site using SSL (like your bank does).

Dynamic DNS Support
OpenDNS Accounts support the use of dynamic DNS (DDNS) update mechanisms to allow you to securely manage your Account and get your preferences even with a dynamic IP address. Read for details. Note: Because OpenDNS uses SSL, there are several very good DDNS clients which do not (yet) work. We are going to encourage various developers to add support for SSL to their otherwise very strong DDNS software.

Statistics
Everyone from individuals to network operators will enjoy a bit of insight into statistics about their DNS usage. How many DNS requests per day do you make? How many individual domains per day do you resolve? On that pretty graph I see for the OpenDNS service, what am I contributing? Basically, we’re taking the stats we show the public and giving you similar insight with the stats that relate to your DNS traffic.

Just as a heads up — while DNS resolution is blinding fast (as always), our stats processing happens (as our network guys say) out-of-band and is done separately. You will not see statistics immediately (at least, not just yet). It may take as long as 48 hours for your stats to appear.

We feel strongly that this is a platform for DNS unlike anything that has ever existed before and continues to help OpenDNS bring about evolutionary changes to the DNS that dramatically change the end-user experience.

P.S. If you have OpenDNS preferences, they will continue to work until they are superseded by an OpenDNS Account with the same IP address. We suggest that anyone using OpenDNS preferences set up a free account now and verify your IP address.

We’ve been quiet recently. Too quiet.

Seriously, all of us are focused on two large projects, each of which will see the light of day shortly. Both of these efforts won’t surprise those who have been paying close attention to some of our previous writings.

Just to add to the behind-the-scenes fun, our growth (thank you!) has accelerated some of our storage upgrade plans, since we hate falling behind in our stats processing. As noted on the system status posts [1, 2], DNS services are not affected by stats processing, deliberately — but it means our pretty graphs get stuck until we catch up.

(And, yes, London is still in progress.)

Yesterday we crossed the 4,000,000,000 (That’s four billion!) overall DNS query mark.

More importantly, we also crossed the 100,000,000 (That’s one hundred million!) DNS queries per day mark.

Check it out:

Woo Hoo!