Technofriends

Google has announced a public DNS resolver to help users speed up their browsing experience. DNS or Domain Name System is a crucial part in the rendering of webpages. I have written in depth about DNS in my article titled How does a DNS work?

As resolution of a hostname to an IP Address is the first step in getting connecting to the webserver, from a performance standpoint, its important that the nameserver resolver is able to give back an IP address for the hostname without much delay. A slower nameserver resolver ( most of the ISP’s have slower nameserver resolvers) can lead to a delay of 20 – 120 ms in the overall performance of the website. There are many things to consider when identifying a DNS resolver that works for you, such as speed, reliability, security, and validity of responses.

The other public open dns resolver i have always recommended is OpenDNS (read: Open DNS: A big DNS Cache). Google Public DNS is also like OpenDNS, free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider.

As per Google, Google Public DNS servers are available worldwide and use anycast routing to direct all packets to the closest DNS server.

How to get started with using Google Public DNS server?

Getting started with Google Public DNS server is as simple as using OpenDNS. You just need to configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers.

One important thing to note is, if you are behind a corporate network and have lot of internal ( intranet etc) domains, switching to a public dns resolver by Google might cause issues.In such a case, you must checkout with your system admin before you make this change.

In case if you have issues, below are the Google Public DNS telephone support numbers

* 877-590-4367 in the U.S.
* 770-200-1201 outside the U.S.

If you wish, you can even go through the step by step instructions mentioned here for modifying your primary and secondary DNS server entry.

Comparing Performance of Google Public DNS Server with OpenDNS

I just did a test from India to figure out which of the two DNS resolvers are faster and here are my results

1.) Domain lookup for technofriends.in

Using OpenDNS : 430 msec

Using Google Public DNS : 200 msec

2.) Domain lookup for google.com

Using OpenDNS : 230 msec

Using Google Public DNS : 200 msec

Clearly from India, Google Public DNS server is doing better as compared to OpenDNS.

Also Read:[Security] How a Distributed Denial of Service Attack on your DNS Server can bring down your Website

[How-To] Block Specific Domains Using OpenDNS

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