DNS Racing

If you're interested in making the most of the Internet you pay for, have a look at using a local loopback hosts file to kill off blacklisted domains (worth a google, I've mentioned it before).

If you've already done that, then look at customised / carefully chosen DNS services. I like OpenDNS because they offer transparent logging / filtering if required and they have a nice little daemon to track your public IP if your ISP changes it. They also run anti-phishing and URL typo protection.

Once you've chosen your DNS provider, test them using Google Namebench (free download). This was my result - surprising that Virgin Media do such a good job of DNS resolution! I was expecting to be able to smugly declare that OpenDNS was a massive improvement. I guess this result is because of where I live.