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Why Should I Use A Third Party DNS Provider For My Local Computer?

The majority of people with highspeed DSL or cable internet connection for home or office already have their dns resolvers configured to use their ISP providers' DNS servers.
DNS servers basically translate something like www.yahoo.com into an ip address 209.131.36.158.  Once translated, your browser can show the site.

But there are times when your ISP provider's DNS servers get bogged down and takes a little longer to resolve or not at all during periods of high usage.  The end result is the website you're trying to access either is slow to resolve or does not show in the browser. 

For several years, I've been using a third party dns provider, OpenDNS whose sole function is to resolve domain names as fast as possible.  If you go to their homepage (http://www.opendns.org), there are a lot of companies of all sizes using them.   They also have a feature which prevents your browser from accessing  phished sites(those fake banking sites that looks like Royal Bank or other major banks) .  There's also protection against zero day vulnerabilities, worms and viruses.  There's also an option to do web content filtering.  If you have children, you can prevent them for viewing adult websites.  You're wondering how much for this wonderful service. Well, it's actually free!  There are different plans but the free version is more than enough for end users.  The higher plans are for small businesses or larger corporations.  For list of all features, check out http://www.opendns.com/start/. They make money from free accounts by displaying suggested sites if you type in the incorrect website.  If you click any suggested site, they make few cents off that click.  It's a good tradeoff.   

Google also threw their hat.  Last week, they announced they are also providing free dns services but they do not YET have content filtering, zero day vulnerability checking, virus, worms, and phished site protection.  But give them time and they'll eventually catch up to OpenDNS.  Check out their blog announcement.  When you use Google's DNS servers, I kinda get scary with the amount of profiling they can do.  They can find out which sites people are visiting!  I'll stick to OpenDNS for now.

Google's DNS servers are easy to remember!

Primary DNS: 8.8.8.8
Secondard DNS: 8.8.4.4

OpenDNS is a little more difficult:

Primary DNS: 208.67.222.222
Secondary DNS: 208.67.220.220

UPDATE: Looks like a third company just announced they are offering this service. It's Comodo, SSL certificate providers and other security products.
http://www.comodo.com/secure-dns/index.html
It looks similar to Google's offering.

Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting
http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/