Mac Speed using OpenDNS

A Quick tip on speeding web browsing on my Powerbook or any other computer by using an alternative DNS Server. I had run into Safari being slow in the past and recomended a way to speed things up but I now have even an easier way, using a free service called Open DNS, its not a new service or anything but it sure works sweet, you simply go to their website http://www.opendns.com/ and on the right side there are two DNS numbers, you add those into your network settings in the system preferences and thats it for a basic easy way to do it. What this does is use Open DNS's Domain resolution instead of using your ISP's (mine being Charter at home and TDS at work). Open DNS has lightning fast servers and with the number of people using it most every site is cached so the speed up was signifigant for me, let me explain a little about DNS as I know it, a basic explanation of it goes something like this; every website is hosted at some type of IP address (more than one can be on every IP, but more on that another time) so when you type in google.com in your browser your computer sends that request out to a DNS server that looks at it and then looks at its map of the internet and looks up the address that google.com lives at, then it steers your browser to something like 64.233.167.99 and low and behold you are at the site you want.

Some other benifits to OpenDNS service is they have taken out a lot of entrys that are know Phishing sites, so you more security along with your speed boost all for free, if you sign up for a free account there are many other things you can do, you can go through their site and set up lets say that you don't want access to adult site you can select that and they will supply DNS numbers to one of their servers that has a majority of the adult sites blocked, if you wanted you can go as far as to plug these DNS numbers into your router so all the computers on your network by default will use the more secure servers. on their site there is great instructions to doing things like this. Give this a try and give me some feedback on how its working for you, along with some details on your setup.