OpenDNS vs Google DNS
OpenDNS has always been the standard for public DNS, serving up to 20 billion DNS queries each day. They offer a host of features to improve your web performance, security and monitoring, and all you need to do is set your Internet/Network settings to their DNS servers, instead of the ones provided by your ISP.
Today, in Google’s continued attempt to take over the Internet, they released their own public DNS service, which, like OpenDNS, aims to achieve improved website load times. The Google team had the following to say on their blog:
“As the web continues to grow, greater load is placed on existing DNS infrastructure. Since Google’s search engine already crawls the web on a daily basis and in the process resolves and caches DNS information, we wanted to leverage our technology to experiment with new ways of addressing some of the existing DNS challenges around performance and security.”
Although I am sure that Google do care about improved performance and security for their customers, I think it is safe to assume that it is actually your DNS information that they are after. This is not necessarily a bad thing as the new data should allow them to improve your overall web experience, especially when using Google Apps.
To try out Google DNS for yourself simply update your Internet/Network DNS settings to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. However, early testing using namebench (the open-source DNS Benchmark Utility) shows that if you live in the UK, OpenDNS is still quicker then Google DNS and together with the fact that OpenDNS also has a more feature rich platform and a proven track record, I personally don’t see any need to switch at this time. To start using OpenDNS update your Internet/Network DNS settings to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
