Cyber-Monday, what a great day for Comcast’s DNS (Domain Name System) service to fail. This isn’t the first, or last, time that an ISP’s DNS has failed. Even when the commercial ISPs’ DNS are working flawlessly, they don’t tend to work that well. Fortunately, there are better alternatives.

My two favorites are OpenDNS and Google Public DNS. While OpenDNS offers additional paid services, such as Web content filtering, both offer free and faster DNS support.

To use OpenDNS’ DNS service, you can set up a free Basic Account, but to just get the benefit of its DNS, all you need do is set up your local router and/or PCs to use 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 for their DNS settings. With Google Public DNS, you do the same thing except you use these DNS Internet Protocol addresses: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

How you do this depends on your network devices and your PCs’ operating systems. Here are the basics for the major desktop operating systems.

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