Open DNS
 

Any downside to using open DNS on home internet? Does it improve speed of loading pages and improve security as well? Any cost involved. I have looked at the website and it says "free". I grew up with the understanding you don't get something for nothing.

I recently installed an Apple Airport Express and that gave me an increase in speed of page loading, will the open DNS give mw more improvement and should I do it at the router or on each computer.

Will my service provider object to this change? I have Frontier in upstate New York and it 's the only show in town so don't want to screw up my service.

Any guidance is appreciated.

"If it ain't broke, then don't fix it" and KISS are words to live by....you'd simply be adding another layer of complexity and potential issues imo.

Are you "knowledgable" about these things...serious question. I don't know squat about OpenDNS, but did support corporate DNS servers when I was "in the game" along with a whole bunch of other stuff. Tread carefully...I've experience more "DNS issues" that brought a major corporation to it's knees more times than I care to remember. Just my .02...

Thanks for the caution. I am quite pleased with my system the way it is so really don't want to rock the boat.

Open DNS is fine.

I don't use FIOS's DNS servers because frankly they suck ass.

To OP, your ISP won't even know nor will they even care.

If you do it at the router it will propagate to the PC's or if you want to experiment just set up one PC. You can keep your current DNS servers and add others which is actually a good idea for redundancy.

Read about that and might check into it further. Thanks for the feedback.

Grab a copy of this, https://code.google.com/p/namebench/

It's a utility to find the fastest DNS servers for you.

Generally the ones closest to you are faster and your ISP's may not be the closest.

OSX, Windows and Linux versions available. Download link is on the left under Featured.

Depends on what your ISP does with your DNS requests.

Not only is my ISP's (windstream) DNS server slow but also "broken" - instead of returning a NXDOMAIN when a domain doesn't exist it sends you to a search page. Not what DNS is supposed to do.

So I run my own cache-only DNS server on my own machines (all linux boxes) and I have one on my LAN for the wife and kids machines, the cell phones, etc.

My ISP's perform just fine, but if I had an issue with my "favorite" sites (i.e. Pelican for example), I'd also consider hard coding them in a "host file". I've seen some REALLY crappy application design before (i.e. performing the "same" DNS lookup like 50 times just to return a single web page). Also makes a big difference if the lookups are cached or not. Again, I wouldn't do squat if I wasn't experiencing a reason to do so, but that's just me....

I'm going to stay put for now. Our service is poor up here compared to the Albany area but not sure I will see any marked improvement in a change of DNS. My big complaint has been interrupted service and that does seem to be improving. Frontier is the only internet provider so were stuck with them for now. Guess that's what we get for living in a state park. Cell service is non existent in our area but the hikers and hunters don't know that. Such is the life of dealing with the APA.
Thanks to all for the guidance.

As a "test" to see if your DNS is performing OK, you might try hard coding a "lookup" in a "local host" file (or whatever it may be called) on your platform just to check.

Thanks, that would be nice if I knew what you meant. I have no idea how to do that. Really, I'm fine for now. No way I can get a dramatic improvement in speed until service provider makes some changes. We are quite close to the main router, no so good for others that are further away. Some folks are still using dial up in the area. pretty sad.

If your router dynamically grabs an IP address from your ISP (FIOS, etc), you may have any DNS settings over written when the lease expires or you reboot the device. However, if the router is providing addresses to your systems, you can probably configure which DNS servers to use and push those settings out. You can always use 4.2.2.2, 8.8.8.8, etc, rather than ISP specific DNS