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The Domain Naming Service

Transferring or Moving a Domain

I transferred my domain to RapidSystem.NET, but I can't get at it. I get my old site instead. Why is that? When will I see the new site?

When the Internet started there was a system designed where nameservers remember or "cache" the IP address of a site.  This was done to speed up finding sites. Without it, each time you visited a site the whole look-up system in the graphic above would have to be repeated. The problem is, if a site moves, these servers remember where the site "was" for a few days.

Your ISP's server will flush the information and ask the internic root for the location of the domain. This whole process is called propagation. It can take 96 hours or more for the update (flush) to take place. RapidSystem adds your domain as soon as the InterNIC root database updates. The key to seeing your domain on our servers is the cached entries that your ISP has.

If we are upgrading or changing an existing site we can run into the same problem.  What we do is set a portion of your DNS record to tell other servers NOT to cache the IP number. This allows us to make the change without any downtime to your site. However, we must still wait for the current cache on other DNS servers to expire.  If you request an upgrade or downgrade to an account it will take a few days before we can do it without creating site downtime.

More Technical Info...

Propagation: what is it exactly?

A portion of a DNS record contains a value called TTL. This tells other DNS servers how long to remember the IP numbers of a site. A value too long is not good because if a site moves it will take a long time before the rest of the net knows that the site moved.  Too short of a value makes the lookup process above take place too often. We set a TTL value of 4 days at Rapidsystem.

In a practical  example Fred connected to his ISP visits a site on Monday. Sally using a different ISP visits the same site on Tuesday. On Wednesday the site moves to a new IP number. In this example the TTL value is set to 3 days. Both of these ISP's servers were told to remember the IP number for 3 days. Fred won't see the new site until Thursday and Sally won't see it until Friday. It's important to remember that it's not a big global change all it once.  Different people will see the change at different times depending on when they visited the site and whether their ISP already had the site in cache or not.  

Likewise a TTL value of zero tells other servers not to remember the IP at all. This is actually useful in some cases where you are trying to move a site but don't want to wait out the propagation. In other words you want the site change to be seen right away.