Whois domain lookup allows you to trace the ownership and tenure of a domain name. Similar to how all houses are registered with governing authority, all domain name registries maintain a record of information about every domain name purchased through them, along with who owns it, and the date till which it has been purchased.
You can search for an unlimited number of domains!
Use seemydns.com to perform a DNS lookup and see information of any domain from DNS servers located in many countries around the world.
If changes are made to new or existing domains, you can verify they have been updated correctly without manually querying remote servers. In this way, you can see how your website, email, or other online service is being resolved globally.
For diagnosing problems, many operating systems provide DNS tools to check DNS records manually. Nevertheless, these tools can be difficult to use for non-technical people, which is why the seemydns.com DNS checker was created to help quickly verify DNS propagation.
By maintaining a range of DNS servers to perform lookups with, seemydns.com makes it easy to perform global DNS checks. In order to make the results more understandable at a glance, these results are parsed and displayed on a map. After a search has been completed, you can view individual lookup results in detail by selecting a server location from the list or clicking on the map markers.
When DNS zone changes seem to not be working as expected, DNS propagation is often asked about as a way to check the current state of DNS results worldwide. It can take as little as a few minutes to complete this process, but can often take 48-72 hours.
DNS does not propagate technically, but it is the term that people use. In order to speed up future DNS check requests, DNS requests are recursively forwarded and looked up from the local resolver to the authoritative name server on demand and cached. Therefore, when performing DNS checks, commonly used DNS servers are selected from large network providers around the world.
People in different parts of the world can access DNS results cached by many different recursive DNS resolvers for popular websites. It is possible that some people are seeing an older version of your website if you have recently made changes to your configuration, and the TTL has not yet expired.
An IP address (such as 192.168.2.1) is converted from a name (eg. seemydns.com) by the Domain Name System (known as DNS). Computers communicate with each other over the internet using these addresses. Names are easier to remember than numbers, so DNS makes this process easier.
The IP address of a website is first checked in your local DNS cache when you visit it with your computer, phone, or tablet. When your device hasn't looked up this website recently, it will need to ask your configured DNS server, which will forward the request to the DNS server responsible for managing the records. It is called a DNS lookup request.
Once the IP address is known, it is stored locally for a set period of time known as the Time To Live (TTL) and used to speed up future requests. It is often the reason that DNS changes don't appear to work right away because updated records aren't returned until this time has expired.
By lowering the TTL of your DNS records a few days before making changes, you can speed up DNS propagation and prevent delays. This will ensure that any old records expire faster when the change is made. When people are having problems and trying to speed up DNS propagation, they find out this after making changes and wonder why they aren't seeing instant results.
If you have checked DNS globally, but are seeing different results locally, then you might consider flushing your DNS cache, or switching to another DNS service. You can also manually override your local DNS entries in your system's hosts file as a last resort; however, this is a temporary measure and only works with certain types of records.
In most cases, DNS propagation takes between several minutes to 48-72 hours or longer, depending on your record's TTL setting. However, there may be other reasons for a long propagation time.
DNS propagation can take a long time due to the following reasons:
DNS Cache - A local device or DNS resolver is allowed to cache DNS data for a specified period of time (TTL). When this duration expires, the local device or server removes existing DNS information and performs another DNS lookup to fetch new information. Higher TTL settings can often delay DNS propagation.
ISPs - Your ISPs also cache DNS results, which means many users can access sites more quickly. For every website requested, the DNS server will only ask the DNS server once but return the same result to many users. In addition, some ISPs ignore TTL rules, keeping cached DNS records, even when they have expired. This causes DNS propagation to take longer than it should.
DNS servers other than your ISP's - If you aren't using your ISP's DNS server, then the same issues can still occur.
Changing web hosting or DNS providers for your domain often requires updating your authoritative name servers as well. You will have to update your domain name's corresponding TLD name server to reflect these changes. The .com TLD name server would have to update if you changed the NS records for example.com, which can cause delays in DNS propagation.
The different types of DNS servers involved in a DNS check play different roles and may not be necessary at all depending on the situation. Having all these different kinds of servers contributes to DNS propagation problems.
Your ISP automatically provides you with a recursive resolver, which can also be configured on your router or individual devices. Recursive Resolver - A recursive resolver is the DNS server you communicate with. These DNS servers are ideally located in close geographical proximity to return results as quickly as possible. The servers cache a copy of the DNS results for future use.
DNS root name servers return IP addresses of TLD (Top Level Domain) name servers. For instance, if you try to resolve example.com, the root name servers return the IP address of the TLD name server that runs .com domains.
A TLD name server returns the authoritative name servers for each domain under the Top Level Domain it's responsible for. An example.com TLD name server will return results for example.com, but not example.org.
DNS authoritative name servers store DNS servers' configuration data for specific domain names.
Here is an example of what happens when a user requests to visit www.example.com for the first time and does not yet have cached results. As you can see, each step introduces a possibility of DNS propagation delay.
☞ In your web browser, you type www.example.com.
☞ The device sends a request to the recursive resolver you have configured.
☞ For .com domains, the recursive resolver asks the root name server for the IP address of the TLD name server.
☜ The root name server returns the IP address of the .com TLD name server to the recursive resolver.
☞ The recursive resolver asks the .com TLD name server for the address of the authoritative name server responsible for example.com.
☜ The .com TLD name server returns the IP address of the authoritative name server to the recursive resolver.
☞ The recursive resolver asks the authoritative name server for the IP address of www.example.com.
☜ The authoritative name server returns the IP address of www.example.com to the recursive resolver.
☜ The recursive resolver returns IP address of www.example.com to the browser.
☞ Your browser makes a web request directly to the resolved IP address.
DNS propagation can be checked for the following types of records:
A number of additional types can also be checked, which are usually used in more advanced configurations: AAAA, CAA, PTR, SOA, and SRV.
DNS records can contain multiple types of records, such as www, CNAME, and MX records, which are used by websites and email servers.