Forwarding and DNS Records

[Octet]

Hello Daniweb,

I'm having some issues with getting my Domain to go to my website. I registered my domain through 123-Reg.co.uk and I've forwarded to the servers which are hosting my site.

I can get the website to load when I go through a proxy, but when I try and access it or when someone who uses the same ISP as me tries to get to it, the website shall go to the 123-Reg holding page.

I am guessing that it is a problem with our ISPs DNS records not yet being updated (the domain is new, about a day old). The strange thing is that sometimes my friends (using the same ISP) can access it... but this has only happened once or twice out of fifty or sixty attempts.

Anyone have any ideas, the website is http://www.gsytourism.co.uk

Thanks

[JorgeM]

I was able to access the site. If the domain is new, it may take some additional time to ensure that the DNS zone syncs across the rest of the .co.uk DNS infrastructure. This "sync" time depends on their processes with regard to creating the secondary zones as well as the Host records you created get transferred to the secondary zones.

One final thing to consider is the TTL value for your host records. If a DNS server at an ISP caches a resolution request, or a DNS client resolves the hostname, the record in question will remain in cache until the TTL expires.

[Octet]

Thank you for clearing up what is going on, although I'm not sure I fully understand the business with TTL?

Would you be able to clear it up for me, thank you.

[JorgeM]

TTL is time-to-live. Every DNS host record has an associated TTL. The main purpose is to set the time that a DNS resolver can cache a record so that future requests to resolve the same record does not require the resolver to perform another lookup. Without the caching ability, hosts would have to perform a DNS lookup over and over again for the same resource.

A low TTL value results in low cache time, but allows you to be more responsive when you update a record. Say for example, when you move the website to another host. If the www record had a TTL of one hour, then this would guarantee that within the hour of making a change to that record, every host that has cached the record will purge the last query result within the hour. This causes more lookups to DNS though. A TTL value of 1 week is long and a change to a record would take 1 week to purge on cached resolvers. However, this results in far less DNS lookups.

Long TTL values were good back in the day when bandwidth was very expensive and computers had less processing capabilities.

Some additional info about the Windows DNS Resolver and Cache:
http://www.itgeared.com/articles/1048-dns-resolver-cache-and-time-to-live-ttl/

[Octet]

Thanks for the response, I think I understand it now.

Thanks for all the help!

[123regonline]

Hello,

I work here at 123-reg.

I have checked your site and it is displaying correctly. We do recommend that you allow up to 24-48 hours following changing your domain names DNS for the changes to propagate. You should be able to see the website displaying correctly very soon. If you do need any help or advice I would be more than happy to help.

Regards,

Nerys