Why might I not see my routing changes take effect?

When updating the functionality of your domain in a way that affects the routing of the domain, the changes are committed immediately, however the changes will take time to propagate across the Internet to you.

Examples of routing changes are:

If you have visited your domain recently prior to making changes, then what you will be viewing is a cached version of your site for the next 6 to 24 hours - even after making the changes. This is delay referred to as DNS propagation delay. This means that upon making changes to the functionality of your domain, you will need to wait the 6 - 24 hours it takes for the changes to 'reach' you.

Alternatively you can try accessing your site via a method that has not visited your domain recently, such as on your smart phone. Once you have visited the site, that instance is what becomes cached for the next 6 - 24 hours.

The Time-to-Live (TTL) value in the DNS records for your domain is what governs how long DNS propagation takes. For domains utilizing Webnames.ca's Name Servers, the default TTL is 6 hours. If changes are going to be made to the routing of your domain, propagation delay time can be decreased by lowering the TTL one full cycle before making any changes.

Example: If the initial TTL is 24 hours, then the TTL should be lowered to a smaller value (such as 1 hour) - and this change to the TTL needs to then propagate across the Internet before you make additional DNS record changes - so lowering the TTL would need to be done at least 24 hours prior to making any further DNS changes. This allows the new TTL to propagate so that any subsequent DNS changes will only take 1 hour to propagate.

Once all DNS changes have been made, propagated, and verified, it is advisable to again raise the TTL on your domain back to its default value. A higher TTL value lessens the frequency and load on the DNS infrastructure everywhere on the Internet.