DNS Propagation & TTL (Time to live)
In order to understand DNS propagation, you must first understand a little about how DNS works. When you set up your website with us, we create a Master DNS record in Domain Name Servers. The domain registrar (the company you paid for to get your domain name) points to the web host’s DNS server and it is the master authority of your domain.
When any outside source wants to know how to find your website, they first go to the registration database to find out who the DNS authority is for your website. Then they visit the hosting provider’s DNS servers to find out what the IP Address is for your domain name, and from there the audience can view your website.
The problem with this whole scheme is that in order to speed up the rate at which their customers can view the Internet, each Internet Server Provider caches their DNS records. This means that they make their own copy of the master records, and read from them locally instead of looking them up on the Internet each time someone wants view a website.
This actually speeds up web surfing quite a bit, by:
(1) speeding up the return time it takes for a web browser to request a domain lookup and get an answer
(2) actually reducing the amount of traffic on the web therefore giving it the ability to work faster.
The downside to this caching scenario and what makes it take so long for your website to be visible to everyone, is that each company or ISP that caches DNS records only updates them every few days. This is not any kind of standard, and they can set this time anywhere from a few hours to several days. The slow updating of the servers cache is called propagation, since your websites DNS information is now being propagated across all DNS servers on the web. When this is finally complete, everyone can visit your new website. Being that the cache time is different for all servers, as mentioned above, it can take anywhere from 36 to 72 hours for DNS changes to totally take effect.
Temporarily, you can access the website or Webmail using IP before you can use your domain.
Extra Information
- The DNS server time to live (TTL) is default 86400 seconds (1 day).
- The DNS resolver is common to have 1 day to refresh the DNS cache.
- Therefore, the DNS propagation is maximum 1 day or LESS.
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