A lot of support requests we receive at the Helpdesk are about domain propagation with clients not being able to view their newly created sites.

If you are using personalised nameservers, we are assuming that these have been registered by yourself to the IPs that we assigned them.

Let's assume that you've created your domain in your WHM. You've contacted your domain registrar and you've updated the DNS info for that domain so that it now points to your website. Your site will not become visible by the domain name for neary 48 hours. Why is this taking so long, you ask? Basically all the ISPs around the net have to update their DNS cache and this takes time.


• What is Propagation ?
  Propagation is the time during which your DNS Zone information is spread abroad to servers that didn't know about it before.
  
  
• Why does it take so long ?
  There are various reasons, but some studies have suggested that there are literally millions of DNS Servers that need to be notified of the new information!
  Propagation takes two forms; changes to your DNS Zone and changes to your WHOIS information. The WHOIS is the master record that tells every DNS Server in the world which is the authoritative server for your domain. A change to your WHOIS information (done my your domain registrar) can take up to 72 hours to propagate fully. A change to your DNS Zone information typically affects only a handful of servers, and so is done much more quickly.
  
  Now, you've created the domain in your WHM, gone to your domain registrar where you purchased the domain and changed the DNS information to the new nameservers. Now the waiting game begins. If your domain has a dedicated IP address, you can access the site via the IP address right now. You can also access the site via the http://SERVERIP/~username.
  
  A common question we get is "Why can I access the site but my client cannot access the new site?" The answer is that your ISP has updated its DNS information, but the ISP of your client has not. Hence you are looking at the new location of the domain name, whereas your client will still be looking at the old location.
  
  Use this page to check the whois and other nameserver checks for your domains - http://www.verisign-grs.com/whois/. You can check to see that your nameservers are registered properly and that your domain name has the updated nameservers. Just because you can see the updated information on this page, this doesn't mean that your site is viewable at its new location by everyone around the net. True domain propagation takes up to 72 hours, maybe even longer.