Over recent weeks I have been having problems with a slow Internet connection because it has been taking five seconds or more to resolve a domain name, and sometimes even timed out. You may think that five seconds isn’t long to wait but when it takes five seconds every time you send a request for a page; you lose one minute per every 12 pages you view, see just how much time you’ve lost over the course of an average day? Yesterday it was refusing to resolve addresses completely and upon further investigation I realised that the Orange DNS servers were not responding and have been down for nearly 24 hours now. It’s just as well the house I live in has a backup Internet connection to find a solution for my technical issues by finding alternative DNS servers and changing my network config to use the DNS servers from the OpenDNS service and suddenly things are flying along. OpenDNS also have lots of little add-ons if you sign up, which isn’t required to use their DNS servers. It’s great for parents that want to block adult content and/or specific sites and also has a stats facility to keep tabs on websites visited from computers on your home network.