: My new website gives 404 only when accessed from my home wifi Ten hours ago I signed up for a HostGator account and uploaded my new website. I also updated my registrar's DNS info to point

@LarsenBagley505

Ten hours ago I signed up for a HostGator account and uploaded my new website. I also updated my registrar's DNS info to point to HostGator's nameservers.


I agree with closetnoc.

10 hours have gone, so you got about another 38 to go before everyone sees the new page. A DNS record has an IP address associated with it and its cached for at least 1/4 of a day (this is what closetnoc means by TTL - Time to Live). You might have tweaked yours to make it a day. The point is, someone might have accessed your site one second before you updated the DNS settings. This means the same user will likely have to wait for the cache lifetime of the DNS (6 to 24 hours) before they see data from the new IP.

Everyone that is concerned about your site should run PING from their computer about once every hour or so until DNS points to the correct IP address on their computer as well.

Anyone who accesses the old IP address or the domain name before its updated at their end will end up at the 404 page that you have shown.

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@Sherry384

Obviously- you know what you are doing!! It is refreshing!

Short of a real problem, these things can take anywhere from 24-72 hours to fully propagate the DNS records noramlly. One way to know if things are working okay is to temporarily update your local computers DNS entries for the site SOA (often it is the registrars) DNS servers. This is a trick I use often.

I used to be a webhost. When a site is created, it is possible that the local DNS is set to a generic site/server to capture early traffic. If you are using your host as your SOA, then it just may be that while creating your site the DNS was defaulted to one place and then updated later. It could be that your ISP does not have the update yet. It is also possible that your ISP is caching DNS as a way of cutting down request traffic. This is very common though I think it stinks. We see this fairly often here. Usually time is the remedy.

As you have written: Indeed from my wifi the domain resolves to 216.172.[redacted], while from my phone (3G) it resolves to 216.172.[redacted] (and works). I tested adding this IP as an entry to my PC hosts file and it works now.

DNS propagation can get us into trouble when creating a new site especially when DNS caching is used. I understand why DNS caches are used and generally I do not argue with their use but rather the effect. Some ISP DNS caches ignore TTL (time-to-live) metrics especially if they are short. This would include temporary settings made by webhosts and registrars. The shorter TTLs are mostly there for a reason. Instead, ISPs will either use a consistent TTL across all cached records, ignore very short TTL times and opt for one that is longer, or just plain ignore the TTLs entirely and cache records for a period of time regardless. I have seen this be as long as a few days, a week, a month, but rarely longer. What a mess this creates! Especially for new sites and new webmasters who are green. As a webhost I never cached anything as not to confuse my users. The difference in traffic was small enough not to worry.

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