Google Public DNS and Hulu

Usually my computer literacy helps. This time it hurt. I have spent the last couple hours trying to diagnose why Hulu hasn't been able to load videos lately. It has been spotty here and there. Oddly enough it loads the ads just fine, but today it just failed when loading the show, every single time. So, after I dismissed my conspiracy theories about Hulu trying to boost their ad views, I... I don't know what I did. I guess I called Comcast, complained, had them reset my connection twice, bypassed the router, realized it would work bypassing the router, and then somehow ended up two hours later realizing that using Google's Public DNS was the problem.

I had set up my Airport connections to use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as their DNS (those are Google's DNS IPs), however, I hadn't set my ethernet connections to use them. Somehow I managed to realize that it wasn't the router (after restoring to factory defaults), but that it was the DNS. I'm actually still impressed with myself for determining that and not getting carried away with my other possible solutions which included buying a new router and more drastically cancelling Comcast and switching to Verizon. But switching back and forth between Comcast's DNS and Google's DNS proved that for some reason Google's DNS was breaking Hulu for me.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if the intermittent 2 minute blocks of no internet connectivity followed by a return to connectivity were also DNS-related.

Bye-bye Google DNS.