Fixing DNS problems

- You type a website in your browser address bar and press go. But nothing happens for a long time.

- It happens for multiple websites.

- Often you receive "Unable to resolve domain name" errors.

All of the above are symptoms of DNS errors in your network.

The reason for DNS errors are malfunctioning or unavailable DNS server of your internet provider. When computer tries to resolve website name it first looks on your internet provider DNS server for matching website IP address. If DNS server is not responding it may take significant time for computer to realize it and go to another DNS server. Or it may just fail completely.

Best way to fix it is to setup your computer in a way to ignore your internet provider DNS servers completely and go to large DNS servers which are located in always-on data centers and which will never fail (they may still fail but chance of it is much lower than for the servers of your internet provider).

Below are instructions on how to set your computer to use Google or OpenDNS DNS servers.

How to fix it (Windows OS)

- Open "Control Panel". Either select it from Windows Start menu or type "Control Panel" in Window search box.

- Select "Network and Sharing Center"

- Select "Change adapter settings".

- You will see multiple connections. Double click on an active one (it will be highlighted in blue).

- In a dialog with connection details click on "Properties" button.

- You will see a dialog like one below. Choose "Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)" in a list and click "Properties"

- Next dialog will have multiple edit boxes. Choose "Use the following DNS server addresses" option.

- In the "Preferred DNS server" field type

- In the "Alternate DNS server" field type

- Click on "OK" on all dialogs that you opened. Your DNS settings are now configured to use Google DNS

If you don't want to use Google DNS servers (which are and you can use OpenDNS servers below: