For the past year or so I was one of those guys that worshiped OpenDNS, to a point where if I fixed your computer I would ask if I could set your DNS to use OpenDNS.
Well I regreat all of that now, for the past week OpenDNS has been nothing but issues. It's been reverting to old DNS my site was loading on a server that it hasn't used in Months I thought maybe godaddy reverted my nameservers to the old ones but I checked godaddy and my non OpenDNS systems and it was just OpenDNS with the wrong nameservers.
Then I am working on several sites updating their nameservers I know it takes a day or two to get it updated (4 minutes with my ISP's DNS servers) well for some reason after updating OpenDNS the next day decides to revert back to the old nameservers for all but 2 of the domains. Then I have to wait a few hours then after 10 minutes of the site working they go back to the old nameservers again. At first I thought my server had blocked me in the firewall but it was crappy OpenDNS.
Pissing me off I finally stopped using them and will never recomend them again.
OpenDNS works just fine for me, it's a lot more reliable than my standard ISP nameservers.
DNS servers do cache their results.. but (I think) generally only for as long at the domain TTL (time-to-live). I have noticed that the TTL for one of my domains is a stonking 60 days. Hmmm....
I switched back to my ISP DNS and it's way faster than OpenDNS.
I just spoke with some guy that recomended OpenDNS to me a year ago and he said he ditched them a few months ago because they were slow to update and often reverted to an older cache.
The OpenDNS forums do see to have complaints about speed. I've had a few sites not resolve recently, perhaps that could be the problem.
The thing with OpenDNS is that I have always suspected that it runs on a pretty marginal business model. The whole operation has to run on some rarely displayed ads (they come up if it cannot resolve the domain name). Outgoings must be significant with all those users.
Anyone know of a good alternative? Heck, I'll even pay (a little) for reliable DNS.
Just pick one as primary and one as back up. They use Anycast protocol to route you to fastest and closest dns server so it doesn't really matter which actual # you choose. More info elsewhere on the web.
OpenDNS fragged all its transfers to youtube this weekend. Last straw for many.
