Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-12-14 23:24:10 - Graham Ellis
We switched up to the 50 Mbyte Virgin Cable service a few weeks back - looking for still faster internet connection. Most of the time, our traffic levels don't need such a high speed link, but we've two dedicated servers (housed in England and Germany) and we need to take incremental and occasionally full backups - and at such times the service provides a seriously shorter transfer. It's also good for faster upload at the times we're viewing webcams over the link.
But, curiously, browsing speeds hadn't improved. A distinct pause from page to page, and a message at the base of the browser "looking up www.google.com" or some other domain name gave us the clue ... the DNS servers that we've been using appear to have been overloaded, or are perhaps being used to throttle back traffic.
Chris pointed me in the direction of Google's public DNS service, with a DNS server at 8.8.8.8 and another at 8.8.4.4 - see [here] for details - and a switch to using those machines gave an immediate obvious improvement. I've switched a couple of our systems to use the Google service, and I'm going to watch how it goes. And perhaps we should set up a local DNS server at the hotel and at HQ to cache address lookups.
We will see some other differences ... a mistyped domain name that points to something that's not registered has been leading to a Virgin Media search results page; now it leads in many circumstances to Google's best guess. So there's another positive outcome. Part of me worries that Google is becoming a bit of a monopoly, but they're providing a technically excellent product once again.