Apparently I know nothing about domains

talk random
1

(Sorry if this is in the wrong section, wasn’t sure)

So, I have had a site ‘olddomain.net’ hosted with a local hosting company for a couple years now. I just registered a new domain ‘newdomain.com’ with a better hosting company a few days ago. I don’t want to pay two hosting companies, so I figured I would make ‘olddomain.net’ an addon domain of my new host.

So I changed the dns of ‘olddomain.net’ to point to the new hosts nameservers, and in the new hosts cpanel, added ‘olddomain.net’ as an addon domain. I also added all of the ‘olddomain.net’ site’s files to the appropriate addon directory in my new host, and changed the main page so I could check that it worked.

I assumed this was all I had to do, but apparently not. When I go to ‘olddomain.net’ in my browser, it still shows me the ‘old’ version of the site, so it’s apparently still pointing to my old host… I am kind of an idiot when it comes to this stuff, so that makes no sense to me. What am I missing?

2

How long has it been? It can take up to 48 hours to sync.

3

How long have you waited since you changed the old domain’s DNS info? I think that it can take a while for the change to propagate throughout the internet.

Edit: Beaten to the punch. :hurt:

4

If you changed the dns records to point to your new host then you should be good. It will often take several hours or even a day for dns records to propagate and update your old domain name to point to the new host.

Edit: Really beaten to the punch.

5

I changed the ‘olddomain.net’ to point to the new nameservers a couple days ago. I’ve checked whois to confirm that it now points to them, too.

6

Perhaps it’s because you’re in Montana. Are you accessing your website through a bison?

7

Yes, but it’s bluetooth enabled and syncs with other animals wirelessly. Perhaps coyote is up to his old mischief.

8

:lol:

9

So I also set up my old email address ‘mail@olddomain.com’ with the new host, and all of my new messages have gone to the new host, rather than the old. However, the site itself is still coming from the old host. I might break something.

10

Mail will usually migrate before http does… just be patient. In extreme cases DNS migration can take up to 4 days…

11

I thought the internet was supposed to be instant. I’m not ok with this.

Really though, thanks… I will be patient, and hopefully it’ll work itself out…?

12

Well you also have to factor in your ISP and if they’ve cached it or whatever. One way to get around that is to use opendns - http://www.opendns.com

I’ve had to use in on a few occasions, works like a champ and pretty easy to setup.

You may also check w/ someone else that’s not close to you and see if they are able to see the “new” site

13

Just for a bit more info on what everyone’s talking about: The reason it takes so long for your DNS record to update is because of a special value called the TTL or Time To Live. Its measured in seconds and pretty much tells either your computer or your ISP how long they should cache your DNS records before requesting a new copy. TTL is important because it exponentially cuts down the number of requests to DNS servers, leaving them to perform more important tasks such as serving up your beautiful webpages. :wink:

14

Make a dig against the nameservers of your ISP and the name servers of your new hosting company… You’ll get the answer…