Quote:
Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
I think the difference it makes (in speed) increases the further you get away from London. VM's advantage is having local DNS caches around the country in each part of their network - external providers such as Google or OpenDNS don't. Hence if you're in South-East England, you're looking at maybe 3-5ms to VM's nearest DNS servers or 5-10ms to everyone else's in London. In Scotland you're looking more like 3-5ms to VM's nearest DNS servers or 15-20ms to London.
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You say that, but both OpenDNS and Google's DNS seem consistently faster than Virgin's for me - and I'm in the bloody north west!
http://i.imgur.com/4STxRLl.png
Of course I know pinging isn't the same as actually doing a lookup, but various DNS benching tools I've tried tend to give similar results to what I see there. ~10ms here and there probably isn't going to kill me or anything, but the stability can't be sniffed at.
Quote:
Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
As for outages, can't say I notice them much, but admittedly during the years I was with VM I usually had Google DNS set anyway mainly because it was just easier to remember when entering network settings by hand!
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I hear that! Though for some reason, OpenDNS's IP's seem permanently ingrained in my head. I've been using them since long before Google DNS was a thing, though. When I was at Virgin, I always got customers to ping an IP address, usually Virgin's DNS, to rule out DNS issues right away. If I was in doubt, pinging 208.67.222.222 was another good way to check for a DNS fault.
Now that I sort of manage Active Directory at work (Thankfully not Virgin), I've since learned that DNS is nearly always the cause of issues for everything. If in doubt, it's probably a DNS fault.