- Oct 23, 2012
- 12,527
Namehelp is a DNS optimization tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux that can significantly improve your web performance, whether you use a public DNS like Google Public DNS or OpenDNS or your ISP’s. Developed by Northwestern University researchers, the app runs in the background optimizing your DNS configuration and automatically fixing the interaction between DNS and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).
DNS, as we’ve mentioned before, is like the phone book for the internet, connecting your computer to websites. Most popular websites rely on a Content Delivery Network to deliver their content faster. According to the researchers behind Namehelp, public DNS services aren’t very efficient at getting the content from CDNs, redirecting users to CDNs farther away than necessary.
Namehelp aims to fix that. Once you install the program and configure it (setting your computer’s DNS to 127.0.0.1), Namehelp will start improving your web performance. There’s a convenient Chrome extension to quickly access the Namehelp dashboard, where you’ll see benchmarking and performance graphs. In my tests, using Namehelp showed a 341% performance increase over the default DNS from my ISP.
Your mileage may vary, but it’s definitely worth a try.
Download Namehelp