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)

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

A193 - Web Application Deployment - DNS
  [690] Adding Virtual Hosts - (2006-04-19)
  [686] Name Services - telling your LDAP from your DNS - (2006-04-16)

G206 - Well House Consultants - Our training centre
  [3545] Finding all matches to a pattern in Perl regular expressions - (2011-12-09)
  [2943] Our facilities to support Well House Consultants Courses - (2010-09-02)
  [2926] Journey times to Melksham, Wiltshire - (2010-08-17)
  [2660] One number for Well House - 01225 708225 - (2010-03-04)
  [2538] Open Source Training Centre and Courses for 2010 - (2009-12-16)
  [2126] Weeding out old phone numbers - (2009-04-11)
  [1240] Fancy going to Glastonbury? - (2007-06-22)
  [1200] Training information - England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland - (2007-05-22)
  [640] Training Centre Pictures - (2006-03-09)
  [627] JIT or JAU - (2006-02-27)
  [448] Out of the norm. - (2005-09-23)
  [256] Spring is in the air - (2005-03-24)
  [53] Drive the drive - (2004-09-18)

M153 - Well House Manor - Training Facilities
  [3521] Emergency First Aid at Work (HSE) training in Melksham - places available for 19.1.2012 - (2011-11-15)
  [1227] Melksham businesses - networking together - (2007-06-10)
  [379] Getting the lighting right - (2005-07-15)

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