One of the first steps of establishing your online presence is registering a domain name.

Once you do that, and get a dedicated server from a provider you can trust. You hear the awful, somewhat scientific sounding expression: "DNS Propagation".

In order to understand DNS propagation, you must first understand a little about how DNS works. 
In order to do that, please read: What is DNS (Domain Name Service)?

When the people who invented DNS came up with it, they realized that that in order to speed up the rate at which their customers can view the internet, each Internet Server Provider caches their DNS records. All this means is that they make their own copy of the master records (the DNS information, if we want to keep it simple), 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 internet 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 every ISP can set this time anywhere from a few hours to several days.
The slow update 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 be totally in effect.

If you wish to check the DNS propagation status for your website, you can use this tool.

Was this answer helpful? 5 Users Found This Useful (145 Votes)