What is DNS propagation and why does it take so long?

What is DNS propagation and why does it take so long?

You have been eager to get a website online and want to start sending and receiving emails. You have registered your domain name and purchased one of the hosting packages and you have written your website. You upload your website and create your first email address but when you load up your web browser and type in your address you get an error. Your website does not load and people are trying to email you but keep getting the message bounced back.

After sending a support request though to our technical team we confirm that it is due to DNS propagation and it may take up to 72 hours before your website and email works correctly.

Caching

So now we know how DNS works at a very basic level, but that still does not explain why it can take up to 72 hours for your website and email to start working properly. The answer to this is something called Caching. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) handles thousands of website and email requests every minute. To speed up the rate at which they can serve the location of websites and email servers, each ISP makes a local copy of their DNS records. This local caching does help in two ways. One it reduces the time it takes a web browser to receive the IP address of a website, and two it actually reduces the amount of traffic on the internet giving it the capacity to work faster. The DNS propagation is caused by the fact that each ISP or DNS server administrator all update their DNS records at different times. Some update them every few hours, but some may only update them once every few days. There is no standard on this and its entirely down to each company to set the refresh times. This slow updating of the locally cached DNS records is called DNS propagation. Since your website address and email server address is being updated on every single DNS server in the world (millions of servers) its easy to understand why it may take a few days for this to complete.

Can I speed it up?

The simple answer is no. There is nothing that you, IEInternet or anyone else can do to reduce the DNS propagation times. It is simply a case of waiting for this automated process to complete.