Five tips for optimizing your Internet connection

By Brien Posey

Takeaway: If your Internet connection is sluggish, try these tricks to perk it up.

Few things in life are as frustrating as a slow Internet connection. Unfortunately, there isn't much that you can do about many of the things that cause the Internet to slow down. Things like switch congestion or segment congestion (outside your network) are beyond your control. Even so, you can take a few steps to make sure that your Internet connection is functioning optimally.

1: Avoid DNS bottlenecks

 If you have an Active Directory environment in place, you no doubt have an on-premise DNS server. Recently, I have seen several instances of organizations virtualizing their DNS servers and placing them on host machines that have little capacity remaining. The basic thought behind this is that DNS does not require many system resources, so DNS server placement can be treated almost as an afterthought.

 However, your DNS server's performance has a major impact on the amount of time it takes for users to access Web pages. So it's important to make sure that your DNS server has sufficient resources to prevent it from becoming a bottleneck.

2: Use DNS forwarders

 Another thing you can do to optimize your Internet connectivity is to make use of DNS forwarders. The idea behind a forwarder is that if your DNS server is unable to resolve a query, it sends the 

 It's common to point the forwarder to the DNS servers that are owned by a company's ISP. The problem is that these DNS servers can be located anywhere. For example, my ISP resides in South Carolina, but it uses a DNS server in France. If you really want to optimize your Internet connectivity, your DNS forwarder should point to a DNS server that is in close physical proximity to your geographic location.

 If you aren't sure where your ISP's DNS servers are, I recommend using one of the visual trace route applications to determine where the DNS servers reside. The Visual Trace Route Tool is one free option.

 If you do determine that you're forwarding DNS requests to servers that are far away, the forwarder should be redirected to a DNS server that is in closer geographic proximity. If you don't know of another DNS server you can use, try checking out OpenDNS.

3: Use a proxy cache

 You can also optimize your Internet connectivity by using a proxy cache, which offers two main benefits. First, it provides your network users with a degree of shielding because it is the cache, not the user, that ultimately contacts Web sites. More important, a proxy cache can dramatically speed up Internet access.

 When a user enters a Web URL, the request is sent to the proxy server, which then issues the request on behalf of the user (similar to the way a NAT device works). When the proxy server receives the requested content, it forwards it to the user, but it also stores a copy for itself. If a another user requests the same content, the proxy server can deliver it without having to send the user's request to a Web site. Cached content is delivered almost instantly, so the result is lightning-fast Internet access for your users (at least for any content that has been cached) and decreased Internet bandwidth usage.

 The good news is that you may already have everything that you need to set up a proxy server. Microsoft's Forefront TMG can easily be configured to act as a proxy cache.

4: Secure your wireless access points

 You may be able to optimize your Internet connection by securing your wireless access points. I realize that this sounds ridiculous to anyone who is managing an enterprise class network, because all your access points should already be secure. But a tremendous number of small and midsize businesses are operating unsecured wireless access points.

 From an Internet optimization standpoint, the problem with unsecured wireless access points is that they allow an Internet connection to be used by anyone. A neighbor could potentially be consuming the majority of the available bandwidth.

5: Block streaming media sites

 You can further optimize your Internet connectivity by taking measures to prevent bandwidth from being wasted. One such measure is to block access to any streaming media sites for which there is not a legitimate business need. For example, you might block access to YouTube in an effort to prevent users from wasting Internet bandwidth by downloading viral videos.

Five tips for faster Web browsing

Takeaway: If you're wasting too much time waiting (and waiting and waiting) for Web pages to load, give these tips a try. You should see an immediate, noticeable boost in speed, making your browsing experience faster and more efficient.

Everyone wants faster Web browsing. After all, who has time to wait for Web pages to load these days? This is especially true if you're a tab-junkie like me. When you live with an open browser containing 10 to 15 tabs running at any given time, you know how crucial it is to have as fast a browsing experience as possible. But how do you manage this? Are there tricks to getting more speed when your pipe is maxed out already? You bet your sweet bits and bytes there are.

 Not every solution will work for every user, and not every solution should even be attempted by every user. However, if you like to eke out as much blood as you can from every turnip, let's see how you can squeeze a bit more speed from your browsing experience.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Use a fast browser

 Not all browsers are created equal. Some are simply faster than others. The top speed you will find, in the current crop of browsers, belongs to Google Chrome. If you've grown accustomed to Internet Explorer or Firefox, you'll notice a dramatic increase in rendering time using Google Chrome. Of all the ways you can speed up your browsing experience, this is by far the best. Google Chrome also helps speed things up by allowing you to enter search strings in the URL address bar. With this feature, you don't have to add yet another toolbar, thereby slowing down the browser even further.

2: Disable Flash

 Flash pretty much saturates Web sites now. It's almost impossible to get away from this technology. Problem is, Flash can be slow, so it directly affects the speed of your browsing experience. You can have Flash turned off by default and then re-enable it to view what you need to view. The biggest problem with this is that some browsers require an add-on to block Flash. For Chrome, you need the extension Flashblock. There's also a Flashblock extension for Firefox. Internet Explorer has a built-in tool you can access by clicking Tools | Manage Add-ons. In the Manage Add-ons dialog box, double-click Shockwave Flash Object. Then, click the Remove All Sites button. This will disable Flash for all sites.

3: Save your temporary Web files on a RAM disk

 I wrote an article awhile back on using a RAM disk to help speed up disk-intensive applications. Since the RAM disk will be much faster than your standard hard drive, using it to save all your browsers temporary files will create a faster environment for your browser. However, this solution is not for the newbie, and you will need to use a third-party to better achieve this task.

4: Get rid of all those toolbars

 You've seen them in the wild: browsers so filled with toolbars they take up the majority of real estate in the browser window. Most users don't realize those toolbars tend to slow down the browser in many ways. Some toolbars simply take up precious computer memory, while others eat away at bandwidth by sending and receiving data in the background. The math here is quite simple: The more toolbars you have, the slower your browser will run. Some of those toolbars might seem essential. But if speed is really your top priority, you will want to jettison that extra baggage for the speed you will gain.

5: Use tabs, not windows

 Too many tabs can cause problems, but they're still your best bet for browsing efficiency. How do tabs speed up your experience? A couple of ways. The first is all about organization. With multiple tabs in a single window, it becomes quite a bit faster to locate the page you need to work on. You don't have to maximize a window, discover that it's not the right one, minimize it, maximize a new window… until you find the correct one. A single window open with multiple tabs is far easier to search. This is not the only way tabs can help you. Browsers like Chrome treat each tab as an individual process (instead of a child process of a parent). So when a Web site causes a tab to crash, you can close that one tab and not lose all the other tabs. This behavior is not a standard at the moment, so you'll need to switch over to the Chrome browser to take advantage of it.

10 things you can do to conserve Internet bandwidth

By Brien Posey

Takeaway: You can take a number of practical steps to reduce your organization's bandwidth consumption. Here's a rundown of some strategies to consider.

As organizations move more and more services to the cloud, it is becoming increasingly important to make efficient use of the available Internet bandwidth. Here are a few techniques you can use to conserve Internet bandwidth in your own organization.

1: Block access to content-streaming Web sites

 If your organization allows employees to use the Internet for personal use, the first thing you should do is block access to streaming media sites, such as Netflix, YouTube, and MetaCafe. Playing the occasional YouTube video probably isn't going to have a crippling effect on your Internet connection, but streaming videos do consume more bandwidth than many other Web-based services.

2: Throttle cloud backup applications

 If you're backing up your data to the cloud, check to see whether your backup application has a throttling mechanism. An unthrottled cloud backup solution will consume as much bandwidth as it can. This might not be a big deal if you're backing up small files (such as Microsoft Office documents) throughout the day. But when you first begin backing up data to the cloud, an initial backup must be created. I have seen this process last for months, and if left unchecked, it can Vendor HotSpot

Here to help you with your Document Management Needs

3: Limit your use of VoIP

 VoIP is another bandwidth-intensive protocol. If you plan to use VoIP, you might implement a policy stating that phones are to be used for business calls only. While I will be the first to admit that employees sometimes need to make calls that aren't specifically related to work, almost everyone has a cell phone these days, so limiting the office phones to business use only shouldn't be a big deal.

4: Use a proxy cache

 A proxy cache can help limit the amount of traffic created by Web browsers. The basic idea is that when a user visits a Web site, the contents of the page are cached on a proxy server. The next time that person visits that Web page, the content does not have to be downloaded because it already exists in the cache. Using a proxy cache not only saves bandwidth, but it can give users the illusion that your Internet connection is much faster than it really is.

5: Centralize application updates

 Today, almost every application is designed to download periodic updates over the Internet. You can save a lot of bandwidth by centralizing the update process. For example, rather than let every PC in your office connect to the Microsoft Update Service, you should set up a WSUS server to download all the updates and then make them available to the individual PCs. That way, the same updates aren't being downloaded over and over again.

6: Use hosted filtering

 If you operate your own mail servers in-house, a great way to save bandwidth is to take advantage of hosted filtering. With hosted filtering, your MX record points to a cloud server rather than to your mail server. This server receives all the mail that's destined for your organization. The server filters out any spam or messages containing malware. The remaining messages are forwarded to your organization. You can save a lot of bandwidth (and mail server resources) because your organization is no longer receiving spam.

7: Identify your heaviest users

 In any organization, there will be some users who use the Internet more heavily than others. It's a good idea to identify your heaviest users and to determine what they are doing that's causing them to consume so much bandwidth. I have seen real-world situations in which a user was operating peer-to-peer file-sharing software even though the administrator thought that the users' desktops were locked down to make it impossible for anyone to do so.

8: Aggressively scan for malware

 Malware can rob your organization of a tremendous amount of bandwidth by turning PCs into bots. Be aggressive in your efforts to keep the desktops on your network clean. Here are some resources that can help: 

• 10 ways to detect computer malware
• 10 more ways to detect computer malware
• The 10 faces of computer malware
• Five tips for spotting the signs of malware
• Rescue CDs: Tips for fighting malware
• 10 free anti-malware tools worth checking out
• Virus & Spyware Removal Checklist

9: Use QoS to reserve bandwidth

QoS stands for quality of service. It is a bandwidth reservation mechanism that was first introduced in Windows 2000, and it's still around today. If you have applications that require a specific amount of bandwidth (such as a video conferencing application), you can configure QoS to reserve the required bandwidth for that application. The bandwidth reservation is in effect only when the application is actively being used. At other times, the bandwidth that is reserved for the application is available for other uses.

10: Make sure you're getting the bandwidth you're paying for

 A lot of factors affect Internet bandwidth, so you can't expect to connect to every Web site at your connection's maximum speed. Even so, your Internet connection should deliver performance that is reasonably close to what you are paying for.

 I haven't ever seen a situation in which an ISP intentionally gave someone a slower connection than they were paying for, but I have seen plenty of situations in which a connection was shared between multiple subscribers. In the case of a shared connection, a neighbor's online activity can directly affect your available bandwidth. If your Internet connection isn't as fast as it should be, talk to your ISP and find out if your connection is shared. You might pay a bit more for a non-shared connection, but the extra cost may be worth it.