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.

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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.