ODS was founded in 1998 by a group of Volunteers (Jason DiCioccio, Mike Dye, Randy Gardner, Collin Rose, and Aaron Sethman). The drive behind the project was curiosity, and the goal later became to fill a void left by the shutdown of The Monolith Project (ml.org).

The original code base was called 'dnsd', which in conjunction with BIND, was the basis of ODS' original offering, free dynamic DNS. The code was later rewritten, alone, by Aaron Sethman after Randy and Collin's departures from the project. The resulting code was called 'dynd' and is still in use at dnsQ.org. On that codebase, ODS got up to a peak of about 85,000 total users.

The current incarnation of ODS is written by Jason DiCioccio and ODS newcomer Fred Klopfenstein. The code features the ability for users to individually control their own domain names, with all of the benefits such as the Dynamic DNS clients that ODS provides. It also features subscription tracking and a high degree of flexibility due to the high number of supported DNS record types and the ability to do things such as set your own Time To Live (TTL) on each record. The code is written in Ruby, using djbdns for a DNS back-end and PostgreSQL as a database back-end. Up to the second statistics for ODS can be found on Scott's ODS stats page.

Support for ODS customers is handled both by Jason DiCioccio and newcomer Elvedin Trnjanin. A small, and somewhat out of date support page for ODS has also been created by Scott Taggart and can be found here.

More information on specific services that ODS provides can be found on our services page.