As a web design company in Egypt, sometimes you need to apply changes to your domain name, whatever was the reason.

These changes take a period of time, so we are going to talk about the DNS propagation here in this article.

What is DNS propagation?

DNS or Domain Name system is something like a phonebook but on the internet; allow me to interpret that to you.

People are accessing the information on the internet through the domain name, which ends as you know with .com or .net, or any other things.

As all of us know too that every device in this world has an IP address; which is unique and can be used to find this device around the globe.

The domain name system, translates it to an IP address, in order to allow to your browser to load the resource, and when you apply changes to the domain name, it takes time to.

DNS Propagation is the period of time it usually takes to apply changes to the domain name.

Simply; it is the period of time it takes the updates to display full effect across the server.

It may take a few hours, and it can take up to 48 hours to catch up the changes.

How domain name system propagation works?

The period of time it takes to apply the changes, depends on some factors, such as:

1- The TTL:

TTL stands for time to live, it refers to the amount of time your server cache the information for the domain name system propagation.

The shorter TTL setting increases propagation speed, and it may decrease your site performance.

2- THE ISP:

ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. It caches the records locally, in order not to retrieve new data from DNS server, which will affect and reduce the traffic.

3- Domain registry:

When we change the name of the server on the DN, most registries update the zone immediately, but others can take long time. 

Time to sum up

When you apply changes to you domain name, it won’t change immediately, this is what we call it DNS propagation. 

It usually takes a few hours or up to 48 hours. Some factors also can affect the propagation like: TTL, ISP, and Domain Registry.