John Roberts from OpenDNS here.

I and my colleagues are hardly "fly-by-night huckster[s]" -- why does the website give you that impression?

We are faster, in part due to our large caches. We never hold a domain longer than the Time To Live (TTL), so our caches are no more likely to be stale than anyone else who respects the standards. And, unlike any other DNS service I know of, we give you (the Internet user) the opportunity to look at what is in our cache, and refresh it if necessary, with CacheCheck. http://cache.opendns.com/

We state clearly in our FAQ how we make money: when a domain does not resolve, we deliver a search results page which also includes clearly labeled advertisements. Your current experience is likely a browser error page. Take a look at http://search.opendns.com and decide for yourself.

As to our phishing protection, it's quite solid. It's not perfect. No one's is. We use feeds from various members of the anti-abuse community, and from PhishTank, a site we operate for sharing anti-phishing data freely. PhishTank data was used by the Mozilla Corporation to test Firefox 2 against IE 7, and it's now in use by Opera 9.1.

Each entry in the feeds OpenDNS receives is validated by an OpenDNS employee.

OpenDNS is a choice, and I hope you'll choose to try us. There's no lock-in, so if you find it doesn't suit you, you can change back easily. I don't think you will want to.

John Roberts
VP of Product, OpenDNS