OpenDNS – Free DNS provider in the Philippines
OpenDNS provide free DNS services worldwide. Along with the standard DNS service, they give you a control panel which allows you to block specific sites or sites that belong to a category (e.g pornography).
Although they provide this service for free, they make money by redirecting incorrectly typed domains to their search page which includes Google ads.
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What is DNS?
Basically, DNS translates domain names like Google.com to IP addresses like 64.233.189.103
Every time you visit a site via it’s domain, a request is sent to your ISPs DNS server asking for the IP address. Your computer then caches that information for future reference.
Benefits of OpenDNS
In most countries, using your ISPs DNS server will be quicker than using those run by OpenDNS since your ISPs server will usually be much closer than those ran by openDNS. However, in some countries, such as the Philippines, the ISPs have a hard time keeping their DNS servers up. You can sacrifice a little bit of speed for long term stability and uptime. Some ISPs in the Philippines (e.g MyDestiny) have already given up trying to run their own DNS servers and push openDNS DNS server IPs out to all customers.
It amazes me how many businesses I’ve spoken to in metro Manila who’ve experienced long periods of downtime with their connection and don’t know what to do. In most of these cases, the connection isn’t really down, only their ISPs DNS server is. Even if you’re not willing to rely solely on openDNS, you should add one of their servers as a secondary point so that if your ISPs DNS server goes down, it will fail over to openDNS.
Other benefits of openDNS are their blocking features. You can block certain categories such as proxies, pornography, social networking sites(facebook) and such like. This is ideal for businesses that want to block some content from their employees without having complicated network hardware.
Another option for speeding up internet browsing or to access blocked websites is to use a philippine web proxy which includes smart compression techniques and such like.
OpenDNS irony
I was reading a post on the openDNS blog about Google and Dell installing spyware on peoples systems, written by CEO David Ulevitch. What is ironic here? Mr Ulevitch has placed a link in the post to Zwinky.com which installs the MyWeb toolbar which of course is known to be one of the hardest to remove spyware applications out there! It’s one thing to sell a link on a businesses blog but to link to the very thing you’re meant to be arguing against… how ironic!