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.
(written 2009-12-14, updated 2009-12-15)

 M153 - Well House Manor - Training Facilities
  [379] Getting the lighting right - (2005-07-15)
  [1227] Melksham businesses - networking together - (2007-06-10)
  [2538] Open Source Training Centre and Courses for 2010 - (2009-12-16)
  [2943] Our facilities to support Well House Consultants Courses - (2010-09-02)
  [3521] Emergency First Aid at Work (HSE) training in Melksham - places available for 19.1.2012 - (2011-11-15)
  [3612] Help to get online in Melksham - (2012-02-13)
  [3816] Want to escape the Olympics? Learn to program in the countryside! - (2012-07-23)

G999 - Well House Consultants - Keynote
  [164] Well House Consultants - review of 2004 - (2004-12-31)
  [225] 10 years and counting - (2005-02-23)
  [295] Pricing strategy - simple and fair - (2005-04-29)
  [360] Spring turns to Summer - (2005-06-26)
  [419] Most popular courses - (2005-08-19)
  [428] Swindon - Chippenham - Melksham - Trowbridge - Westbury train service - (2005-08-29)
  [452] Is enough enough? - (2005-09-27)
  [464] Technical Loneliness - (2005-10-14)
  [549] 2005 - Come as a student, leave as a friend - (2005-12-31)
  [626] Not just a pretty face to answer the phone. - (2006-02-26)
  [695] In the hospitality business - (2006-04-23)
  [774] Bed and Breakfast, or Hotel? - (2006-06-22)
  [845] Course scheduling and Geekmas - are they traditions yet? - (2006-08-26)
  [890] Open - (2006-10-09)
  [898] Courses at Well House Manor - (2006-10-19)
  [929] Presenting Melksham - for a weekend away in Wiltshire - (2006-11-17)
  [1079] Wilts and Berks - two conference / training rooms in Melksham - (2007-02-14)
  [1161] A contrast in room rates and facilities - (2007-04-25)
  [1245] Ensuring that our tutor answers YOUR questions - (2007-06-25)
  [1317] 2008 course schedule - Perl, Python, PHP, Linux, Java Deployment, Ruby and more - (2007-08-23)
  [1319] Customer feedback - lifeblood of a business - (2007-08-25)
  [1414] What we teach - expained for the non-technical - (2007-10-28)
  [1481] The Christmas Letter - (2007-12-22)
  [1492] Well House Consultants Training and Hotel - 2008 news - (2008-01-01)
  [1555] Advanced Python, Perl, PHP and Tcl training courses / classes - (2008-02-25)
  [1615] PHP training courses every month - (2008-04-18)
  [1676] A warm welcome for visitors from the USA - (2008-06-14)
  [1748] Hotel room prices - Melksham, Wiltshire - (2008-08-11)
  [1773] The Longest Possible Day - (2008-08-26)
  [1857] November and December Public Course Schedule - (2008-10-27)
  [1859] Wiltshire at dawn - the tourist trail - (2008-10-29)
  [1929] 2009 - Hotel, Meeting, Training Course prices - (2008-12-07)
  [1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
  [1975] Well House Manor Hotel - on plan for 2009 business guests - (2009-01-03)
  [2144] Looking for a career change - Physician to Web Site Designer - (2009-04-28)
  [2216] Past Delegate Offer - Summer Holiday / Weekend Break - (2009-06-03)
  [2228] Where do I start when writing a program? - (2009-06-11)
  [2326] Learn a new programming language this summer. - (2009-08-06)
  [2384] Looking ahead to the Autumn season of training and accommodation - (2009-08-28)
  [2483] Clustering on Tomcat - (2009-10-30)
  [3164] Brown - or Mrs Sally Brown, accountant from Whitstable? - (2011-02-10)
  [4588] What teach you in a week stays with you for a decade - (2015-11-29)

G206 - Well House Consultants - Our training centre
  [53] Drive the drive - (2004-09-18)
  [256] Spring is in the air - (2005-03-24)
  [448] Out of the norm. - (2005-09-23)
  [627] JIT or JAU - (2006-02-27)
  [640] Training Centre Pictures - (2006-03-09)
  [1200] Training information - England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland - (2007-05-22)
  [1240] Fancy going to Glastonbury? - (2007-06-22)
  [2126] Weeding out old phone numbers - (2009-04-11)
  [2660] One number for Well House - 01225 708225 - (2010-03-04)
  [2926] Journey times to Melksham, Wiltshire - (2010-08-17)
  [3545] Finding all matches to a pattern in Perl regular expressions - (2011-12-09)
  [4012] A course is not just for a year - its for a career - (2013-02-20)

A193 - Web Application Deployment - DNS
  [686] Name Services - telling your LDAP from your DNS - (2006-04-16)
  [690] Adding Virtual Hosts - (2006-04-19)
  [4491] Web Server Admin - some of those things that happen, and solutions - (2015-05-10)

Back to All the Cs ... and Java too

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Open Source Training Centre and Courses for 2010

VAT Changes
Rock and hard place .. and the relaxing right one won
Changing Images
Faster network, but not faster browsing until ...
All the Cs ... and Java too
When should I use Java, Perl, PHP, or Python?
And now for some posts a bit more technical
Five guests, three groups, one car
Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin