SiteCrafting, Inc.

There's always plenty of tech-speak flying around among developers in the office. I certainly try to keep such language at a minimum when working with clients but sometimes it just works its way in there. DNS and other domain-related processes can be pretty confusing, period, let alone to someone anxious for their website to go live. So how to explain DNS propagation?

I overheard a co-worker use the best explanation of DNS propagation ever in the world. It went something like this:

When a new phonebook comes out, I may already have the new one while yours has yet to be delivered. So when dialing the same number we might have two different expectations for who picks up on the other end.

And that's definitely it. When a new domain name is pointed at the place a website is being hosted it can easily take up to a day or more for every corner of the web to get updated with that new information. The internet is certainly a strange beast but with solid analogies like that no one has to be left in the dark.