I’ve always been leary about those “speed up your connection” software schemes. I mean, even my feeble logic seemed to say my net connection was going to be only as fast as my provider let it be. Well, I recently found out about OpenDNS. This is a service that speeds up your browsing by giving you an optimized DNS (Domain Name Service) for the web. To explain, when you type in a domain, www.mooresites.com for example, that is transated into an IP (Internet Protocol) address where the website resided (it’s easier to remember the name than all those numbers!). Well, an index of sorts is kept by your local internet provider. The idea is that Open DNS does a better job at managing this and is, thus, faster.
I’m a believer. I’ve been fooling around tonight with different websites and the lag time between typing in an address is noticeably faster than before. Usually, I would type in an address, press enter, and wait 5 or so seconds for the website to resolve (then start loading). Now, it’s more like 2 seconds maximum . . .
You’ll just have to try it for yourself. Why not, it’s free. Head to www.opendns.com to try it out.
I’ll try to update later . . . there’s a management system where you can block certain sites from the network . . . with personalized error messages. Not a problem since my kids aren’t surfing anything but Nickjr.com, but should come in handy once they want to explore further on the web.
