Today the online presence of companies is an indispensable factor. From social media marketing to online sales through eCommerce, many business processes have now moved to the web, which means that the digital footprint of a company is fundamental.
Suppose now that you have a toy store called “Il Mio Negozio”. After choosing the name, you published a website called ilmionegozio.online. But computers, servers and ISP actually do not recognize or read the name ilmionegozio.online: they need a unique name and address in a language they understand, i.e. in digital format (IP address).
This is where IP addresses and DNS come into play. In this article, we explain the meaning of DNS (Domain Name System), how they work, and how they propagate on the web.
Table of contents
What are DNS (Domain Name System)
A every website is assigned a unique number that serves as a digital address. These are the numbers that the servers and ISP (Internet Service Provider) store in their cache. The system used to allocate, organize, and keep track of these numbers is called DNS, Domain Name System. These unique numbers are called IP addresses (Internet Protocol).
The DNS is the system used to convert human-readable website or domain names into their corresponding digital addresses (IP address).
The server that stores all this information (website names and their respective IP addresses) is called a Domain Name Server. Each domain (website), usually, has at least two DNS servers.
Modify and DNS propagation time
Iniziamo con un esempio: è da qualche tempo che tuo sito ilmionegozio.online è online e la tua azienda sta lavorando a un processo di rebranding. Hai deciso di cambiare il nome del tuo negozio da “Il Mio Negozio .online” a “Il Tuo Negozio .com” quindi vuoi cambiare anche il nome del sito web.
So, go to the control panel of your website and change the name of your site to iltuonegozio.com. It is here that DNS propagation comes into play. Now, it’s important to understand that DNS propagation is independent from the type or hosting plan. Even if you have a modern VPS hosting plan or a stable shared hosting plan, DNS propagation will still affect you in the same way.
When you change the name of your website, you have essentially made changes to the DNS file. This means that every DNS server around the world (including those of your ISP, for example Telecom Italia) must be updated with these new changes. The process in which DNS servers update domain information is called DNS propagation.
Since we know that every single DNS server in the world needs to make a change, it’s natural that this process requires time. Usually, the completion of DNS propagation requires from one to 24 hours. There are also cases where it can take up to 72 hours.
We use authoritative DNS and, except in exceptional cases, we obtain the propagation result in less than 4 hours.
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How does DNS propagation work
Let’s take a look at how DNS propagation actually occurs. So, let’s suppose you live in Spain in Barcelona and that you have just changed the name of your website which is hosted on our servers in Vicenza, Italy.
- Local DNS cache and local ISP: normally, when someone opens your website, their request does not go directly to the web hosting server. Instead, if the person accesses it, for example from London, the computer first checks the local DNS cache and then a local ISP.
- Upstream Provider: from here, the request goes to an upstream provider, let’s say, in Paris.
- Pickup point in the destination country/region: from Paris, the request is transferred to the first pickup point in Italy: Milan.
- Destination ISP: it is only then, after all this jumping around, that your request reaches Italy’s ISP, probably Telecom.
DNS propagation time
That expressed in the previous paragraph is only an example (not necessarily a predefined path for every or any request). However, the process is important to understand why DNS propagation takes a bit of time.
At every step in this way, that is, in each city to which the request is sent, the ISP nodes will check their own cache to see if they have the requested information for the domain.
If these nodes do not have the requested information, they search for and save (DNS cache) it to accelerate loading times in the future. This will also reduce traffic. These nodes, however, have specific update intervals.
This means fundamentally that one server could have up-to-date information while another might not. This is why DNS propagation does not happen instantly and therefore requires time.
The practical aspects of DNS propagation
If you are the owner of a website, you probably have more concrete doubts about DNS propagation.
Is there a way to accelerate DNS propagation?
Sì. Il più delle volte, le modifiche non richiedono davvero 48 o 72 ore. Di solito accade in 5/6 ore. Anche dopo circa sei ore, se non vedi le modifiche che hai apportato, potresti dover svuotare la cache DNS.
This is fundamentally a process in which you remove old DNS information and allow old tables to update.
But if 6 hours are still too long for you and you want to speed up the process, there’s something you can do: modify the TTL settings before changing the DNS. TTL stands for Time To Live.
What is TTL (Time to Live) and how can it affect DNS propagation time?
TTL is fundamentally the period of time for which servers around the world cache your DNS records. So, suppose your TTL is 1 hour. In this case, the DNS servers will cache your data for 1 hour before querying the primary and authoritative DNS server for updated information.
If you reduce this time to one hour, the DNS servers will revert to the “authoritative server” every hour and receive updated information. This will decrease the DNS propagation time. But there is a problem.
This will also increase the stress on your “authoritative server” and will result in low processing speed and stress on the website. So, do it only if you know exactly what you are doing. For all practical purposes, there is no need to modify the TTL. DNS propagation does not take too much time.
If you want to check how far DNS propagation has progressed, there are various free tools on the Internet that you can use to confirm the positions where your DNS information has been updated. We usually use https://dnschecker.org.
DNS Propagation: Summary
With all these tools and relatively fast DNS propagation times, changing the DNS details should not be too stressful for you. However, there is a myriad of guides and videos online that help you through every phase of the process. And in any phase, if you are not exactly sure what is happening, you can always contact us!
Preventing is better than curing, especially if it concerns a technical world like the Internet and if your business depends on this.
As you may have noticed regarding TTL, between optimizing times and damaging your websites, the step is short. That’s why, if you really want to be sure of handling your websites in the best possible way, optimizing times and pushing performances to the max, our advice is to turn to professionals experienced in the field.
And if you intend to follow this path, why choose us specifically? Here are three main reasons:
- A difference from the major providers, Hosting 4 Agency offers dedicated assistance to every company, with technical personnel dedicated that deeply understands your needs
- While the hosting giants grow with standard offers and services, we can afford to give you only custom services, tailor-made on your needs and those of your clients
- Our hosting packages include licenses and services that many large providers often exclude from their plans to make you pay for them as additional services when you need them (e.g., backups).
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