After Your Domain Name Has Been Mapped

When you first create an OM4 website it is a subdomain (mysite.om4tourism.com). After you map it to your domain (mysite.com), the update has occurred but may not be visible straight away.

The cause of the delay is known as DNS propagation.

Whenever a web site’s nameservers or DNS records are modified, the changes are made instantly.

For the Internet to work the way it does, copies of DNS records are made (cached) and kept on numerous servers around the world. For example, your ISP is likely to keep a cached copy of DNS records used by its customers. Your computer also caches DNS records itself.

When the original changes, the Internet takes care of propagating changes to update all of the cached copies. While it can happen very quickly for some, it can take up to 72 hours for DNS changes to propagate all around the internet. The rate at which it occurs isn’t something that can be controlled by you, us or your ISP.

During this time some visitors will still be sent to your old site, and some will be sent to your new site.

You can help speed up the propagation for yourself by restarting your computer. If this doesn’t work, you’ll have to wait for your internet provider to update their DNS records. This usually happens automatically, but there’s no way of telling how long it will take.

Don’t be surprised if some people can see your new site, while others see your old site.

To avoid DNS propagation issues for a new domain name, you can update the name servers at least 72 hours in advance. That way when we map your site to your new domain, it will appear straight away. You can’t do this if you want to map a domain with an existing website you want to keep running until the changeover is ready.