Like any industry, the domain name and web hosting industry has its own quirky jargon. Terms include “DNS propagation” or “domain name propagation.” So what is it and how do you handle it?
The term is often used in relation to when you update the nameservers of your domain name, that is, the address of the hosting service it points to.
When you change hosts or open a hosting account for the first time and update your domain’s nameserver details, it can take some time for the change in details to propagate across the Internet. This period of time is sometimes called the “DNS propagation window.”
DNS stands for Domain Name System. It’s basically the Internet address book; operating quietly behind the scenes to translate human-readable domain names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and vice versa.
After you move your website to your new web host, there will be a period where, depending on where a visitor is viewing the site, they may see it on the new server or the old one, and may even recover and forward between the two.
Unfortunately, the duration of this is beyond the domain registrant, domain name registration service, and web server, as it depends on when ISPs (Internet Service Providers) update their DNS caches; which will be at different times. In some parts of the world it will take just a few minutes, in others much longer, up to 24-36 hours.
This is why it is very important when you switch hosting providers to keep your account and site active on your old hosting for at least a few days. If it’s a forum or blog, you’re changing where user input is stored in a local database; You may want to disable publishing during this period to ensure that new content is not published to the old database.
It’s also a good idea to warn your users and customers of what’s about to happen; after all, things can go wrong and an uninformed customer can become irritable.
Also, continue to check your email accounts on the old server for a few days; Or better yet, set up email to forward from those accounts to another address you have access to that isn’t associated with your domain name.
So how do you know when DNS propagation is complete? There are many free tools available online to determine this – try doing a Google search for the term “dns propagation checker” and you’ll have a selection of dozens.
These tools simply check the IP (Internet Protocol) address associated with a hostname of various servers around the world. If all IPs are the same for 24 hours and it is the IP of your new account or hosting provider; then you will know for sure that things have been fixed and it is safe to close your old hosting account.
