'DNS propagation' is a term widely used to refer to the updating or changing of information relating to a domain across the Internet. Propagation in the defined case takes two forms: changes to your DNS Zone and changes to your WHOIS information. A change to your DNS Zone information typically affects only a handful of servers, and propagates/ completes much faster than a whois edit.
Literally speaking, the WHOIS is the master record which tells every DNS server in the world the server for your domain. A change to your WHOIS information (such as updating the ADMIN-C in your control panel) can take up to 72 hours to propagate fully. This means that during this time, your information may not be uniform across servers as some may have picked up the changes while others may not have.
In order to fully and thoroughly understand DNS propagation, you must first understand how DNS works. When you set up your website with your hosting provider, they create a Master DNS record in their Domain Name Servers. Your domain registrar (the company you paid for the honor of owning your domain name) points to your web host's DNS server as being 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 your hosting provider's DNS servers to find out what the IP Address is for your domain name, and from there your audience can now 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 to 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, and (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 now visit your new website. Being that the cache time is different for all servers, as mentioned above, it can take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours for DNS changes to be totally in effect across the internet.
- DNS
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