OpenDNS Upgrades Network, Rising To The Google Challenge

I receieved the following mail from OpenDNS about their network improvements.

Manu,

I wanted to let you know that last night OpenDNS upgraded network capacity at all of our datacenters.  We have added transit from Level3 across North America and Europe.  This dramatically improves performance for many residential and business Internet users.

I would be interested in seeing if your users are able to notice a significant improvement in performance.

It’s unfortunate that we didn’t quite have all the sites online before the Google DNS announcement, as we were just two sites short of being able to turn on the network.  That said, let me know if renewed testing delivers better results for our OpenDNS users around the globe.

Thanks,
David Ulevitch

The network improvements are in North America and Europe and this may help it to catch up to/better Google in Europe where in many areas Google had come out on top. In North America, OpenDNS was consistently performing better than Google. As you can see in the mail, OpenDNS would like to see performance feedback from users. You can check your DNS performance using the scripts available in my original post (Linux or Mac ) or using namebench (all platforms). Namebench is more accurate but will take much more time.

The DNS wars are heating up and both OpenDNS and Google are battling it out for consumer attention. Though Google has taken away many customers from OpenDNS (like me) OpenDNS hasn’t given up and is indeed upping their game. Wish they removed that NXDOMAIN hijacking and google.com redirect.

I’m not seeing any improvement in OpenDNS performance compared to the last time (In India). This time I used namebench for better accuracy and Google DNS is still 54% faster than OpenDNS in Chennai, India. But this is understandable as the  Asia network was not upgraded.

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December 18, 2009 | Share:                      | Tags:dns, google, opendns

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Manu is a Ruby on Rails developer,blogger, amateur entrepreneur, Mac and Linux enthusiast and a technophile. Read more ››

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