* Introducing OpenDNS
The Domain Name Service (DNS) has been around in its current form for a long time. While DNS is generally effective and reasonably efficient, as with any Internet service there’s always room for improvement and that’s the idea behind OpenDNS.
The idea is simple: OpenDNS has placed its DNS servers in four of the major backbone interchange locations around the United States (London and Hong Kong service points are planned for the near future) to ensure that lookups done via OpenDNS servers deliver the highest performance level possible.
To further improve performance, OpenDNS servers also use very large caches so that they can resolve more name requests without having to refer to other DNS servers. OpenDNS also monitors and tracks phishing sites – should your browser make a DNS request for a known phishing site OpenDNS will respond by returning a warning page from which you can abort loading the site or proceed at your own risk (phishing protection can also be turned off by opening a free subscriber account and disabling the feature).
The OpenDNS service is free so how does OpenDNS make money? Simple. When a search fails OpenDNS attempts to intelligently resolve the request which allows for simple misspellings to be “fixed” (again, opening an account allows you to disable this service) and when that fails, a search page of similar matches is returned which is where OpenDNS does business – the context sensitive ads are its sole source of revenue.
OpenDNS goes to great lengths to explain how to configure everything from routers through PCs and PDAs to mobile devices. The basic requirement is to make OpenDNS your primary DNS server and that’s it.
For more information on what OpenDNS does and how it does it, see its “What We Do” page and the FAQ. OpenDNS also actively seeks peering partners and relationships with ISPs.
OpenDNS maintains a blog, if you want to keep up with its progress, and its Stats page shows a simple but impressive graph of the scale of its service.
OpenDNS is a very interesting concept from both a business and a technical viewpoint. Its challenge will be to avoid going head to head with a larger service provider that wants to get into the game. Given the advertising potential I think we can all guess who could be a very powerful market spoiler.
