Knowledgebase

DNS Propagation

By now all all customer websites should be fully visible and have been since yesterday sometime. If you are still unable to see your own website, this is almost certainly down to your Internet Service Providers (ISP) DNS Cache - wait what ! 

 

In simple terms, Internet Service providers (BT, Virgin, plusnet etc) keep copied information about the websites its customers visit so that if visited again, they can send you there quicker than before without having to do too much work. This is similar to your computers browser keeping copies of the sites you visit so it can send you there without doing a lookup.  

 

This information is stored by your ISP on a powerful computer called a DNS Server and each Internet Service provider  has one. Every time you do a search on the Internet or type in www.whatever.com into your browsers address bar, your ISP is actually looking at this information and uses it to send you to the website you have requested. It is referenced every time one of their customers visit the Internet  and says 'take me to this website please'.  

 

The problem is that this reference information needs to be kept up to date in order to send you to the right server for the website you are visting so your ISPs DNS Server talks to other DNS servers around the world at pre-determined times in order to keep as up to date as possible - and here is the reason why you might still not be able to see your own website but can see other websites. 

 

What we have done is to move your website from one server to another and its likely that your Internet Service provider DNS Server has not yet got refreshed information from others servers of the change we've made. You are therefore likely still being sent to the old server  which is still alive but still does have problems.

 

So, if you have already visited your own website, your ISP will be looking at this same data and sending you to the same location that the website use to be on not the new server that it is on now.  

 

For future reference, this process is called DNS Propagation. 

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