How Fast is Your DNS Provider?
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We use CloudFlare for DNS, and it works wonderfully. We are gearing up for an ISP switch this weekend, and someone above me advised we make our DNS changes on Friday evening to ensure all was well by Monday.
I actually created a new A-record in CloudFlare yesterday afternoon for something, and by the time I could get to the command prompt to try and ping it, it was online already. That's pretty impressive if you ask me. And I specifically remember switching to CloudFlare from another provider in the middle of the night on a weekend and things being fine by Monday.
So, the real question here is...am I rolling the dice by waiting until Saturday afternoon / evening to make those DNS changes?
What is the longest it has ever taken your DNS records to propagate?
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Changes should be made as soon as you can move to the new IPs. For example - if you are moving your www site from 1.1.1.1 to 2.2.2.2, as soon as the 2.2.2.2 site is up, you should change your DNS settings to allow propagation to happen. Some DNS servers on the web only update themselves every day or so. This can cause your customers some problems and there is nothing you can do about it.
If you're simply adding a completely new record, that will be available as soon as it's added because the rest of the DNS servers around the globe have to come back to your DNS servers to learn about this new record.
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@networknerd that's pretty sweet. So you're talking for web hosting and not just general DNS, correct?
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I only use Cloudflare for hosting of DNS records. They do not provide web hosting to my knowledge.
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@NetworkNerd I worded that poorly. I mean the DNS hosting for a websites records and not the actual site hosting.
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DNS used to take 48 hours. Now it takes more like 4. But it is not your DNS provider that determines that, so be cautious.
