Using a different DNS server?

[ninebob]

Now here's something I know sweet FA about...

I have just changed to Bulldog 8 meg service and overall I'm delighted with it. However, I noticed a comment on another forum site in which one user said this:

Bulldog's customer service & techincal support was bad in my experience, using their 8Mbps service. The service wasn't great for browsing either (their DNS either down or very slow at responding).

And then another user said this:

To counter the last two posts, I on the other hand have had excellent service from Bulldog.

I've been with them two years and initial installation at 2mb and the subsequent upgrades to 4 and 8 mb went smoothly.

I'm about 400mts from the exchange and I get a solid 6.7mb connection.

DlMathews right about the dNS servers though, so I use Zens,apart from that, the speeds good (I have four networked computers online), the uploads great and no caps.

Now, I have found the customer service to be superb, and my download speed is averaging around 6.6mb which is more than acceptable given my distance from the exchange and living in a 15th floor flat.

But the comment about web browsing is interesting, because I have indeed noticed that pages don't load any faster than the 2mb service I had before, even marginally slower.

What is a DNS server? When the second comment mentions that he changed to "Zens", what does he mean, would this be a good move for me, and if so how do I do it?

(Dell Dimension 3.06Ghz, Win XP SP2, BT Voyager 205 Router, Firefox 1.5)

 

[2scoops0406]

DNS = Domain Name Server, basically the machine that translates the human readable www.yourfavwebsite.com to the Machine readable IP address of 172.164.88.8 (obviously made up). There is a heirarchy of DNS servers which duplicate lookup records around them. The main DNS servers are called authorative severs, and on the Internet there are about 7 of them. This is not to say that you need to contact on of these servers, as your ISP DNS server should cache a great deal of the www.whatever request, only if it doesn't know, will it "look" at it's authorative server to get resolution, this process continues up the hierarchy until resolution either can or cannot be made. Sorry if this is all a bit basic, but I am no DNS expert, apparently, well no actually I know, people specialise in this sort of stuff.

There you go clear as mud.

Sorry, this doesn't address slow download speed, only a possible delay in starting the download. You have to remember that, other issues apart, you can only download a page as fast as the slowest link in the chain.

Oh, sorry, one last thing the IP address of the DNS server you use is given to you automatically by your ISP, via something called DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), you can change it though.