I regularly have customers tell me that “their internet is slow” despite having such and such speed tier with their ISP. While there can be many causes for slow page loads including, viruses, spyware, network congestion and ISP network issues to just name a few, often the culprit can be narrowed down to just three letters: Domain Name Servers (DNS).

DNS servers are often overlooked when troubleshooting page load issues. However, they serve a very important role in loading every page by translating the page address like www.wrightpcconsulting.com into the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address [72.29.79.198] that your device uses to find and load the page. With today’s highly graphical web page content, sometimes hundreds of address must be looked up to load a page. So, when your DNS server is slow, non responsive or returns errors, page load speeds can be directly affected.

Most customers simply rely on their service provider to assign an appropriate set DNS servers to their device(s). While that often works well, ISP DNS servers are notoriously slow. In order to help my customers determine the best DNS servers for them, I recomend that they use a benchmarking tool like Namebench. Namebench will test your current DNS servers against other open DNS servers and makes a recommendation based on the results.

If after trying Namebench you need help setting up the recommended DNS servers in you computer or router, feel free to submit a ticket.

Here are a few screen shots of the benchmark tests run my Namebench:

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