Recently, I started to realize that pages were taking a long time to load. When I finally became conscious of this, I looked into it. DNS resolution was tasking forever. After a few weeks of ignoring the problem and playing tricks with my provider’s router, I decided to Google my way out of the problem. Sure enough, googling led me to Google’s Public DNS Servers. There are two, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I set up my router to use these and kept my machine configs simple, whereby they specify the router (192.168.1.1).
This still worked like crap.
So, I went and changed every one of my machines to use custom DNS, changing network settings from 192.168.1.1 to 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4. Viola, DNS lookup is now instantaneous. This has already made a HUGE impact on the user experience. The speedup is really kind of miraculous and I’m frustrated that I even had to deal with it.
I made sure to change the DNS config on both the wired/wireless connections for my laptop, too.
If you have similar problems, try the Google Public DNS Servers. The extra configuration might be worth it.