Google’s Site Performance & Public DNS
Google has today announced the start of its Public DNS (Domain Name System) that is expected to give you a faster web experience, linked to the recently announced Site Performance – a Google Labs feature and a part of Google Webmaster Tools.
Site Performance, a Google Webmaster Labs tool helps webmasters know the performance of their sites, average time taken to load a page, and it also shows you a chart listing out the time taken to load a page on your site monthly. You’ll also be presented with few example pages from your site with suggestions to lower the page size by enabling GZip compression, compressing CSS, JavaScripts and DNS Lookups. You can manually/personally evaluate your site’s performance by installing Page Speed, an extension for Firefox. Site Performance can be accessed by logging in to Google Webmaster tools and choosing Site Performance from Labs hyperlink. More at Page Speed Google page.
Coming to Google’s very own Public DNS, it’s a free DNS service that can be used as an alternative to your ISP’s DNS or your current DNS provider. But before choosing Google’s DNS, you should be thinking as to why you should opt for it. Here’s what Google has to say for that
- Speed up your browsing experience.
- Improve your security.
- Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.
If you are not sure what actually DNS is, it’s something that is ‘called’ every time you open a website, in other words, it’s an internet phone-book. Every time you visit a website, you computer performs ‘a’ DNS lookup if it’s a simple website. But take the case of a complex site, your computer has to perform a lot of DNS lookups just to load a single page.
To start using Google’s DNS, all you’ll have to do is just set your Primary and Secondary DNS to
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
If you are not sure how to do this, visit the configuration help page. To find out Performance benefits, visit this page.
Quickie
Google Public DNS
Configuration (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Performance Benefits
Security Benefits
And who are the other DNS providers? I’ve heard of OpenDNS. Is it worth changing the DNS?
Hey Prabhav,
Your ISP should have already given you a DNS. OpenDNS and COMODO offer Public DNS with added features. And yes, 3rd Party DNS are worth opting for, for the features they offer. OpenDNS is equipped with SmartCache & Content Filtering. Google’s DNS gives you a faster web experience.
Yes, my ISP has given me a DNS. But I think I should try google DNS also!