Easy Way to Speed Up Internet

If your internet is slow and you want it to make it find pages and load images faster. Then, you’ve come to the right place. I promise that this will not be painful.

The easiest way to speed up your internet is to decrease the amount of time that it takes your computer to turn a name like “google.com” into an IP address that actually corresponds to a server somewhere with text, images, and scripts that will show up on your computer.

First, go download this application from Google Code called namebench – it’s a free utility that you can run once from your location and find the fastest DNS server. Download it and run the application by installing it and then clicking “Start.” – While it runs (it takes about 5 minutes) read the rest of this article.

DNS cure for slow internet

DNS stands for domain name resolution – and it’s like the phonebook of the Internet. It’s where computers can look up the phone numbers (IP addresses) of other computers. This is REALLY important because every time your computer gets images, text, emails, video from the web it has to look up the number of the computer that has that information (a web server, for instance). Now, the physical distance of your location from any given DNS server is a huge variable that will effect the speeds of your communication with that server and therefore, the rest of the Internet.

90% of the time, the default DNS server for your computer is going to be the address of your router – something like 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 or 10.0.1.1 or 192.168.1.254 – in any of these cases, your router is forwarding the DNS to somewhere else and then relaying the info back to you. This can lead to incredibly slow internet speeds.

To circumvent this, you can manually assign the DNS server for your computer. Mac or PC – Windows or Linux – it doesn’t matter. Every system can benefit from having a faster DNS server setup.

When your namebench test is done, it will give you results like this:

DNS server comparison

In the test from my location in Los Angeles – the fastest server was 4.2.2.1 and the second fastest was 208.67.220.220.

The reason that 4.2.2.1 is the fastest DNS server is that the 4.2.2.1 servers use anycast addressing – this forwards dynamically to your most geographically close Level-3 network DNS server. (Level-3 Communications is one of the largest owners of cable across the country and Europe.)

Is your namebench DNS speed test done yet?

When your DNS speed test is done, you can now change the DNS settings on your computer’s network connection to use the fastest DNS server available in your area in order to speed up your internet connections.

To change your DNS servers on Windows XP:

  • Go to Control Panel>Network Connections and select your appropriate connection if wired – “Local Area Connection” or on wireless “Wireless Network Connection.”
  • Click Properties, then select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
  • Click Properties. You will see a new window pop-up, it is the Internet Protocol window. Select “Use the following DNS server addresses” and enter the numbers of the DNS server(s) that namebench recommended in the space(s) provided.

To change your DNS servers on Windows 7:

  • Open Network Connections by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clickingControl Panel, clicking Network and Internet, clicking Network and Sharing Center, and then clicking Manage network connections.
  • Right-click the connection that you want to change, and then clickProperties. Administrator permission required If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
  • Click the Networking tab. Under This connection uses the following items, click either Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4), and then click Properties.To specify DNS server address settings, do one of the following: To obtain a DNS server address automatically, click Obtain DNS server address automatically, and then click OK.
  • To specify a DNS server address, click Use the following DNS server addresses, and then, in the Preferred DNS server and Alternate DNS server boxes, type the addresses of the primary and secondary DNS servers from your namebench results.

To change your DNS server in OS X:

Go to System Preferences
Click on Network
Select the first connection in your list and click Advanced
Select the DNS tab and add the primary and secondary servers from namebench to the list of DNS servers. Click OK.

To change your DNS server in Linux:

  • Open file /etc/resolve.conf
  • You should see something like this:-

    search localhost.localdomain

    Add your Primary and Secondary Domain Name Servers’ IPs  at the end of the file and it should look like this:

    search localhost.localdomain
    nameserver 4.2.2.1
    nameserver 4.2.2.2