Non-caching DNS (Domain Name Services) Servers will see your domain changes immediately. Caching DNS Servers may take anywhere from a few minutes to as long as 24-72 hours to propagate your domain changes.

If changes have been made to your Domain Name, such as changing your DNS (Domain Name Service) Servers, or making any changes to your domain zone records in DNS, then DNS or Domain Propagation must occur. Domain Propagation may take anywhere from a few minutes to as long as 24-72 hours.

When a visitor tries to visit your website their computer contacts the DNS Servers belonging to their ISP (Internet Service Provider). These DNS Servers then query the registration database to find out who the DNS authority is for your website. Then they visit our DNS servers to find out what the IP Address is for your domain name, and from there your visitor can view your website.

The problem with this is that in order to speed up the rate at which their customers can view the internet, some Internet Server Providers tend to cache non-authoritative DNS records. This means that they make a copy of the master records and read from them locally instead of looking them up on the Internet each time one of their customers wants to view a website. This can create the appearance of speeding up web surfing by a few milliseconds, by reducing the return time it takes for a web browser to request a domain lookup and get an answer, and also reducing the amount of overall traffic on their service.

The downside to caching and why it takes so long for your website to be visible to everyone is that each ISP that caches DNS records only updates them every few days. There is unfortunately no standard for how this is handled, and although the practice is widely discouraged, this time can be set anywhere from a few hours to several days by some ISPs. The slow updating of the DNS server cache is called Domain Propagation, as changes to your domain name’s DNS information are being propagated across all DNS servers on the internet. Once this is complete everyone can visit your new website. Being that the cache time is different for all DNS servers, as mentioned above, it can often take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours for DNS changes to be totally complete.

Please note that all non-caching DNS Servers will see the changes to your domain’s DNS immediately. Google’s DNS Servers and OpenDNS, and most Public DNS Servers are non-caching.