Latest Alexa Rank and Time to Change Domain Names

Lately I have been working more and more on our e-commerce site which has left me less time to do some blogs, which is a pity because I enjoy blogging. I will get back to it soon with some more results and lessons from what I have been doing. As for that Alexa rank I mentioned in the last few posts - well it continues to grow as our traffic grows. Today it is under 485,000 and continuing to rise up the rankings. The e-commerce site (not this blog) now has around 2000 people per month visiting it and that is growing rapidly as well. It is going to be very interesting to see just how high the site goes before it settles down. I also continue to expand the site and its content and range of offers almost every day so it has a way to go yet.

On a completely different topic, the problem of propagation time for a new domain name cropped up for me this week, not a big problem, but definitely an annoyance. On Tuesday morning at 4:30am in fact, I finished off a small site for a friend of a friend in the UK. Yes, I am in Australia, and my host is in the US, and she is in the UK. Isn't it great to live in an internet enabled World? The site was fun to do and we ended up with a great result using a mix of text, and video for a particular sector of the health market. But what was interesting was the time it took for the new domain name to ripple throughout the internet DNS systems. I had read that it can sometimes take 2-3 days before a new domain name is active but previously it has only taken a day.

I registered the domain at my US Host company, and under a day later the domain worked for me. But the person who needed the site in London urgently couldn't see it until over a day after I could, over 2 days after registration. It was interesting how the domain name servers in my network had been updated a full day before hers. I am not sure why, but I have read enough to know it happens. In this case I could see the domain here in Australia, another person in Ireland could see it, but not on the particular network in London. Normally that wouldn't matter too much but this time we were in a hurray, with very short notice to get the site up and running. That is the way it goes. It is up, and running and everyone is happy but I am still curious about why it takes so long for the DNS systems to update.

If you are actually transferring an existing domain from one site, host, or address to another then there are ways that you can change the TCP TTL values a few days prior to the switch so that your actual domain name change takes as little time as possible. To read more on this consult the DNS article in Wikipedia. But you still have to make those changes a few days before.

Until next time


Owen