OpenDNS - A Billion Dollar Business in Making

If that one line of Javascript can earn a billion dollars every year for Google, think what this free DNS service from OpenDNS can do when it will try to leverage its robust infrastructure to make some money?

For those of you who still do not know what OpenDNS does, let me give you a brief insight into their services. OpenDNS is a free service, is open for everyone to use, that translates a domain name to an IP address. It’s much faster than most of the ISPs connections and it does wonders for me. Other important features of OpenDNS service are:-

• Phishing Protection - OpenDNS uses the data from PhishTank.com, their own service, to block phishing sites before they affect you and your network.
• Domain Blocking - Network administrators can leverage OpenDNS to block unwanted sites from being accessed by their users. They would otherwise had to rely on the domain blocking engines of the proxy servers they use.
• Adult Site Blocking - I don’t need to tell you what this is.
• Domain Typo Correction - Automatically corrects your mistyped URLs.
• Web Proxy Blocking - You don’t need a proxy server in your network anymore.

Ok, now let’s see how OpenDNS is a billion dollars business in making.

1. Zero Downtime Network - Their network is one of the most reliable I have ever seen. They process an enormous 40,000 DNS request a second. Check out their live stats. Now 40,000 requests per second is 3456000000 request per day. I don’t want you to calculate how many request it would be a month and an year. Just multiply 3456000000 requests per day with $0.001 per request and you get $34,56,000 per day. You may now want to sit down and calculate how much can they make per year. I am not saying that they should commercialize their services and charge for every DNS query, but if they introduce a service that will effectively earn them $0.001 per query.
2. Ultra Fast Response - Their DNS query response time is much faster even than my own ISP. Their response time makes all the difference.

What can they do with this kind of superb infrastructure?

There are ‘N’ number of things they can get into with such a fantastic network. Some of the most important ones that will turn them into a billion dollar business are:-

• Domain Registration - They might contemplate on becoming a domain registrar and leverage their already established infrastructure to provide best in class uptime. If they do, I will move away from GoDaddy to OpenDNS.
• Content Delivery Network - Their infrastructure can be happily utilized to deliver content for various businesses across the world and let me tell you, companies that are in CDN make a lot of money.
• Dynamic IP to domain mapping - Their DNS update and response time is superb which can be used to offer a DNS service that can map your dynamically assigned IP address to a domain name that will be powered by them. Update: OpenDNS has now launched this service and is called DNS-O-Matic. Read more about their Dynamic IP address service.

If one would want to think of serious propositions with OpenDNS, I am sure there are tons of different other things one can do. So, if any day OpenDNS goes public, invest into them. You should check out their featured customer’s page to understand how reliable their overall service really is.

Are you getting some bright ideas in your mind right now? Talk to OpenDNS!