I made one change with my Internet connection and it sped things up a lot. Let me explain what to do.
Now, I’m going to talk about DNS but this is not for your website or that DNS, it’s the DNS that is used when you need to look up domain names as you use your web browser. It’s actually the same DNS, but just from a different point of view. Anyway, I just want to make this clear – do not use the settings here for your website (no!). You’re going to need to change the settings you use to connect your computer to the Internet (with your ISP (Internet Service Provider)).
It’s best to make these changes network wide if you have a home network or business network. That way, you don’t have to change it on each device – it’s automatically done for all devices using the same Internet connection or using the same network.
There’s a tool that Google gives you called Namebench (https://code.google.com/p/namebench/). You just need to download it and run it. There are Mac and PC versions. They say it takes 5 minutes but it took about a half hour to run for me.
It analyzes a bunch of DNS servers to use and produces some pretty nifty-looking graphs and charts:
You can really ignore all of that if you want because, at the top, it lists which DNS servers you should use to have faster lookups. The faster the DNS lookups are, the faster you can connect and this speeds things up for you.
Now What?
Ok, so you have 2-3 IP addresses you should use for your DNS – now what?
You’ll need to go into your network router settings (this is usually your wi-fi router – it’ll be what’s connected to your DSL or cable Internet modem – there’s the modem and then it connects to another box or somethings your modem and router are the same box), and then manually specify the DNS servers to use.
This is the tricky part and your best bet is to contact whomever set your network up and have them make this change. If you mess this up, you might bring your Internet connection down.
Conclusion
My increase was about 42%, so that’s nothing to sneeze at (why do people say that? I never sneeze at things).
Although you’re not technically getting higher Internet speeds by doing this, it’ll seem faster because your getting faster DNS look ups. You’re essentially using more of what’s already available.
Every little thing you can do to speed up your Internet connection helps. This is a part of that equation. Do it once and you’ll enjoy faster look ups going forward – and that’s worth taking the time to do!
-Tony
