Google’s offering a new free service that I don’t think many have heard about.  It’s new only because I just discovered it; not that it’s recent or anything.  It’s the Google DNS service.  Recently I’ve been having a lot of problems with my ISP’s (Cox Communications High Speed Internet) Internet connection, primarily with DNS lookups.  Oftentimes it would return an error saying that the name can’t be resolved.  In a few minutes it would clear up but it was sure annoying.

About the same time this was happening, I got Vonage service.  This made me think that the problem was with Vonage since it sits between my router and cable modem.  However, even after having re-arrange things by plugging the cable modem directly into the router (like I had it before I followed Vonage’s instructions), I was still experiencing this issue.

That got me to Googling about and I was lead to a variety of free DNS service as an alternative to what my ISP was providing.  One was Open DNS which I tried for a day but it was too slow.  Then I discovered Google DNS.  The main servers are at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 – very esay IPv4 addresses to remember!  I changed it on my router’s setup web page to use these DNS servers instead of the ISP’s default.  So far things are great.  Web browsing seems to be a whole lot faster.

I’ll report back on this issue to see if the name resolution issue goes away entirely.