OpenDNS vs ScrubIT

I’ve been using ScrubIT for some time now. A few weeks ago I decided to try out OpenDNS at home to see how they compare. One of the reasons for my dissatisfaction with Scrubit is that I have absolutely no control over what sites are blocked or open. Every so often some site that was perfectly clean and was something that needed to be viewed would be blocked and there was nothing I could do to fix it other than changing our DNS server temporarily. I signed up many moons ago for ScrubIT’s beta program for more fine-grained control, but I’ve never heard back from them. I decided I was tired of waiting and tried out OpenDNS.

The first and only problem I had was that within the first 4-5 hours of having registered, none of my blocked sites were actually blocked. After that initial delay I haven’t had a single problem. The fine grained control is excellent and reliability seems to be high. I will be switching the Crossroads office over to OpenDNS on my next trip to the office.

One minor tweak I made was to set my primary DNS server to OpenDNS and my secondary to ScrubIT. Both OpenDNS and ScrubIT offer secondary DNS servers, but my guess is that if one goes down, the other may too. Why not increase reliability by using a completely different provider for the secondary?

Now don’t take me wrong. I’m not knocking ScrubIT. ScrubIT has served us well for quite some time, is reliable, and does the job. In fact, I would still recommend ScrubIT for home users who don’t want the added complexity that comes with OpenDNS’s  flexibility.