Create an OpenDNS account and disable “typo correction.” We’ll provide you standard NXDOMAIN responses then. Everything we do is for your benefit, and if you don’t like a feature, you can disable it. We’ve been doing this a long time and have millions of happy customers; no advertising or marketing; just word-of-mouth from IT person to IT person.

Thanks for the great feedback and tests.

-David

They both result in the same Akamai edge servers for me, connected via NTT’s network, also marked Ashburn. My ping to those is 6 ms. Note that these are different servers than the ones that Verizon returns to my friend, yet they are equally close to me.

Both of your nameservers also return identical Limelight servers. These are the same servers that Verizon returns to my friend, the ones that are 7 ms and regional to Washington DC.

What this also tells me is that I can immediately get an improvement in my content download performance from Akamai and Limelight, by switching my nameservers to yours, which I am going to do now. (Sadly, OpenDNS also does the NXDOMAIN hijack, but I’ve learned to live with it, even though it drives me batty every time I mistype a hostname when doing app development.)

I’ve also tried the same experiment on my server in Colorado (off Time Warner Telecom), where the difference is pretty significant. UltraDNS and OpenDNS both have identical Akamai results, 34 ms away; its ISP nameserver results in an Akamai server 49 ms away. UltraDNS and OpenDNS return identical Limelight results 33 ms away, in Chicago. But the ISP nameserver has a much better result, 15 ms away, in Dallas.

I’d love to hear your results comparing OpenDNS in that mix. OpenDNS has been providing anycated recursive DNS and security service for years to millions of consumers, SMBs and enterprise customers.