DNS Propagation
From MDSupportWiki
- What is DNS Propagation?
When any outside source wants to locate your site, they first go to the root nameserver to find out who the DNS authority is for your website.
Then they visit your hosting provider’s DNS servers to find out what the IP Address is for your domain name, and from there they can connect to your site.
The problem with this whole system is that each Internet Server Provider caches their DNS records.
This means that they make their own copy of records, and read from them locally instead of looking them up on the root server
each time someone wants view a website. This actually speeds up web surfing quite a bit.
The flipside 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.
This update time is what we refer to when we talk about DNS Propagation.
It can take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours for DNS changes to be totally in effect.
