Please read this if you have modified DNS settings recently but your domain name or certain host names ("www", "mail", etc.) are not yet working.

DNS is a complex system. Despite the fact that our system propogates updates instantly to our global network of nameservers, there are a few factors that can prevent your domain or hostnames from resolving properly. There are also a few factors which can cause DNS updates to take quite a while -- often 1-2 days or more to complete.

First, make sure you have made the appropriate modifications with your registrar and set our nameservers up as the authoritative servers for your domain. If you registered your domain with Sitelutions and chose "Use Sitelutions Nameservers," you need not worry about this. If not, this is a simple process of logging into your current registrar, finding the "modify nameservers" screen (ask them for help if you cannot find it), and changing the nameservers to the ones that we provide in the "Add Domain" screen (just login to your Sitelutions Account to see this list).

Once you have modified nameservers settings so that our servers are set as the authoritative nameservers for your domain, your registrar will typically take 24-48 hours to update the root nameservers for your top-level domain (.com, .net, .org, .us, etc.).

Please make sure that DNS is now properly configured with Sitelutions. If you have a Sitelutions Space hosting account, the system automatically configures DNS -- you do not need to make any special DNS changes! If you are managing a custom DNS configuration or doing your hosting elsewhere, you should setup the proper DNS records for your domain.

Even after making these changes, your domain / hostnames may take quite a while to work.

Why? All DNS records ("resource records") contain a "TTL," or time-to-live. This TTL tells DNS resolvers (like those that your ISP uses to look up DNS information for you when you request a given domain name) how long to cache DNS records. This is useful because it reduced the number of DNS queries made to the authoritative DNS provider by allowing global resolvers to cache DNS records for an extended period of time. Because they have the records cached, they do not need to look any further or go out to the internet for more information.

Many DNS providers, by default, use a high TTL, such as 86400 seconds (one day), or even greater. Some DNS providers, in an attempt to save money use a default TTL of 2, 3, or even 7 days.

If your previous DNS provider used a high TTL, you may have to wait quite a while until old, incorrect DNS information expires from global DNS resolvers for your domain to work properly. In almost all cases, our DNS is working properly -- it's just a matter of letting old, cached records expire.

If it's been a few days and you are still concerned, you might want to have several friends who are using different ISPs than yours check your domain name -- each will be using different DNS resolvers, which may NOT have DNS information cached for your domain. You might find that some friends get the proper DNS information for your site while some don't -- this is perfectly normal. In a few days, any cached DNS information should begin working and you should see your domain name.

Note that TTL and previous DNS settings are out of our control -- therefore, there is absolutely nothing we can do to speed up this process, or to force remotely cached DNS information to expire -- we'd have to contact every single ISP or operator of a DNSresolver (there is no published list, and if there was, it would probably consist of hundreds of thousands of DNS resolvers) and force them to clear their cache.

If you have a small, local ISP, you might be able to convince them to flush their DNS cache manually. Larger ISPs will typically not do this for you.

If your domain still doesn't work after 7 business days, it's likely that there's a DNS configuration error -- please contact us.