When you make a change to your DNS zone, the changes have to be propagated
to other DNS servers on the Internet before a consistent view single version is viewed
by all clients. This can take up to several days and it depends on many factors,
such as time-to-live values, caching, and the distributed nature of the whole domain name system.
Global DNS Propagation Checker allows you to watch the actual state of the
DNS propagation. You can clearly see which version of your DNS records
are currently in use on more than 30 DNS servers all around the world.
This information is handy during deployment of new services and features to your
servers that do affect your DNS records, or when you are changing your hosting company,
or start a new website.
This tool can also help you solving problems with your DNS zone due to improper configuration
of your main name servers, which may cause the servers not being able to synchronize.
To help reveal more problems, Global DNS Propagation Checker works not only with public DNS
servers, but it also finds authoritative servers for the relevant zone. Each of the authoritative servers
is then queried and its results are included in the final result.
Not always an inconsistent view of DNS records is a problem, sometimes it is a wanted feature
that is used for load balancing. See
Round-robin DNS on Wikipedia
for more information about this.
Using Global DNS Propagation Checker is as simple as possible. Just fill in the Host / IP address
field with your query. Then choose the Query type, which is set to SOA
by default (check DNS Record Viewer for more
information about types of DNS queries). Finally, hit the "Check!" button and wait for results.
The result consists of a list of different DNS record versions that were found by DNS servers all around
the world. With each detected version, the tool provides a list of DNS servers that use it, and the actual
DNS record data. If any of the DNS servers that were queried did not respond properly, it is listed in a special
section of unresponsponsive servers.
