What is DNS propagation and why does it take so long?
You registered your domain name and paid for hosting with a hosting provider, and download your website on the web server. If this is done, why can you not you see the results of your hard work now? What this DNS propagation people continue to tell you?
To understand DNS propagation, you must first understand a little about how DNS works. After setting up your website with the hosting provider, they create a master DNS record in their domain names of the servers. Your domain registrar (the company you paid for the honor of owning your domain name) points to the DNS server of your provider as the authority of the master of your domain.
What is DNS?
DNS stands for Domain Name System, is the service that translates the domain name that you type into your browser into an IP address, and tells your browser which server it should connect to load the website you wish to visit. It is very convenient because you had to remember the IP address of every site you visit, it would surf the Internet much more difficult.
When a site is set up as a hosting provider, we create a master on our DNS servers DNS record, which updates the changes to your DNS records on the server at an interval (e.g every 15 minutes). You can ask the registrar point our DNS server as the authority of the master of your domain enabling us to provide the domain name mappings for your domain.
Factors affecting DNS delay
Your TTL (Time to Live) settings - You can set the lifetime for each record in the DNS zone file of your domain name. TTL is the time period during which servers cache information to your DNS records. For example, if you set the lifetime for a particular record at a time, the servers storing the information in this record locally for an hour before getting up to date information from your authoritative server. Short TTL settings can make increase the speed of propagation. However, short settings also increase the number of requests to your server official name, and that the increase of the load slows the processing time of your server.
Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) - ISP caches DNS records (stores data locally rather than retrieve new data in your DNS server) to accelerate Web browsing and reduce traffic, which slows your delay. Some ISPs ignore TTL settings and update their cache files every two to three days.
Your Domain Name Registrar - If you change the name servers for your domain name, we send your request to change the registry in a few minutes, and publish your authority records NS (name server) for their area root. Most records to update their areas quickly. For example, VeriSign refreshes areas for .com domain names every three minutes. However, not all records are updated as quickly. Registrars often protect their root name servers of overfishing by setting a high TTL to 48 hours or more for the NS records. Moreover, even if the recursive name servers should not cache the root NS records, some ISPs hide the information anyway, which may result in a longer delay.
