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.

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!

We’re big fans of telling our story here on the company website and blog. But sometimes it’s useful to spread the word beyond our own boundaries. Below is our first press release, which went over the wires ~8am ET / 5am PT today. I’ve taken the liberty of adding a few links which are not in the wire service version as it appears on Yahoo Finance and Google, among others.

OpenDNS Answers Over One Billion Questions in First Month

Users Choose New DNS Platform for a Safer, Faster, Reliable Internet Experience

August 8, 2006 — OpenDNS, launched in July 2006, has announced that it has answered over one billion requests for its domain name lookup services. The company provides a free platform of reliable DNS (Domain Name System) service via its distributed network, with additional features that increase the speed and security of DNS. DNS is a fundamental piece of the Internet architecture which maps names to IP addresses. Provided as an alternative to the DNS services offered by ISPs, OpenDNS puts control of the DNS in the user’s hands by providing features that include phishing protection and typo correction for websites. The OpenDNS service automatically knows that the user who typed craigslist.og really meant to go to craigslist.org and directs them to the correct site. OpenDNS is also engineered to help prevent phishing, alerting the end-user when a site is known to be malicious.

“I started OpenDNS with the goal of building a company that would develop products that make the Internet a better place,” said David Ulevitch, founder and CEO of OpenDNS. “As an active and extremely dedicated member of the Internet and DNS community, I came to realize that many of the problems on the Internet exploit weaknesses of the DNS. We have figured out how to work with the current DNS to provide a solution that makes the Internet experience safer, faster and smarter. We are proud to be the first service in this category that puts choice in the hands of the user.”

Before OpenDNS, DNS was not an individual choice — it was either on or off, with no customization available. OpenDNS delivers a service which gives the user control through intelligence added to the DNS. And it’s available, by choice, in two minutes following brief step-by-step instructions. “OpenDNS is a great idea, well-executed,” said Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, the popular blogging platform. “They took something basic and ubiquitous, DNS, and improved it by adding spell-checking and phishing protection (usability enhancements).” [full post]

About OpenDNS
OpenDNS — www.opendns.com — was founded in San Francisco by David Ulevitch in 2005 to deliver a vastly improved Internet experience through a new DNS (Domain Name System) service that provides all Internet users with increased security, reliability and performance. In 2005, the company received funding from Minor Ventures, the fund created by Halsey Minor, founder of CNET, for start-ups delivering the on-demand software model pioneered by Salesforce.com. Open DNS is a free service, with revenues coming from the advertising-driven model developed by Yahoo! and Google. For expert opinions on DNS and the Internet infrastructure, as well as company news, read the OpenDNS blog at blog.opendns.com.

###

Also, two links which don’t fit in the release, but are of interest:

• Stats (yes, we’re over 1.2 Billion already; hit 1 Billion last Thursday, San Francisco time)
• System Status (we put the link at the top right a while ago, but haven’t mentioned it here; part of being reliable is letting you see for yourself)

If any of you look at our stats page as often as we do you might have noticed that the weekly graph was a bit wonky today and that we (temporarily) dropped the daily graph. I put a note up on the stats page explaining it but I’m putting a note up here for posterity.

Basically, in order to keep DNS as reliable and awesome as possible we process all of our DNS stats on other machines, out of the DNS traffic’s line-of-fire to you. The machines we use right now to do stats needed some more RAM and hard drives so we paused the stats processing, had some lunch, added some disks and RAM, and then went home. Sometime this morning we decided to start up stats processing again and now it’s nearly all caught up. So there ya have it, the stats were kinda wonky, but our DNS service was hummin’ along like the well oiled machine it should be and is.

As for future changes to the stats page, I have a lot of ideas in my head but I want to know what you want. What kinds of stats are important to you? I want to be sure what’s important to me isn’t just important to me.

On on,
David Ulevitch

Update: I just got teased by some of the guys here for ‘signing’ a blog post. Well now there’s a smiley too.