DNS Troubleshooting
We understand that DNS is a critical service and we want to make sure that you feel comfortable using our DNS system for your domains. It can be frustrating when you make DNS changes and they are not working immediately, or how you thought they would. To that end, this page contains some helpful troubleshooting steps if your DNS entries do not appear to be working.
The first thing to keep in mind is that you must use our default name servers in order for us to run DNS for your domains. If your domains are set to anything other than our default name servers, none of the records you maintain in our system will have any impact whatsoever. You can check if your domains use our default name servers by either logging into your account and viewing the Domain Manager page, or by running a WHOIS search. Your name servers must be set to*:
- NS1.DNSOWL.COM
- NS2.DNSOWL.COM
- NS3.DNSOWL.COM
*Please remember that name server changes can take time to fully propagate. Therefore, if you change to our name servers, your DNS entries may not begin working until the name server change is fully propagated. You can read more about name server propagation times on our NameServer Manager page.
Next, please remember that we only push DNS changes every 5 minutes. If your DNS change does not appear to be working after 5 minutes, and you have not recently updated the applicable domain(s) to use our name servers, it is very likely the result of browser and/or DNS caching. You can read more about the impact of browser/DNS caching on our NameServer Manager page.
After considering the information above, if your DNS records still appear not to be working how you thought, you can verify that the records are being served correctly by our system by visiting any third-party site that provides information on the DNS records being served for your domains. Here are a few examples (Keep in mind that these third-party sites may also have records cached. Also, you may not see complete results for certain types of records such as A and CNAME. If this is the case, we would recommend pinging those records to ensure that they are being resolved correctly.):