Why 48–72 Hrs for DNS update?

Hi there, we currently have a squarespace site with the domain and DNS being hosted by a third party. We have just built a new Squarespace site and need to now point our domain to the new site.

Squarespace says “If all records are entered correctly, your domain should connect to your site within 24 hours. At times, it can take up to 72 hours. Visit the Domains panel at any time to check your progress.” 

Does anyone know if that is a Squarespace thing or a third party DNS issue? As our DNS host has quick controls of making updates in 2 minutes, so we are confused as to why it can be up to 72 hours, is it a Squarespace reason for the slow changeover? Doesn't make it easy to 'launch' our new site, when we don't know when it will show up as new.

Love any thoughts people have. Thank you. PAT

I have my domains with Google Domains and it took maybe 15 minutes for it to propagate. Yes it says up to 72 hours but in reality it almost instantaneously.

We have followed Squarespace's instructions to repoint our domain from our old version of our Squarespace site to our new version.  Both are on Squarespace, have different built in domains (ie old.squarespace.com and new.squarespace.com) and we have changed the verify.our-domain.com DNS entry (and therefore deleted the old one), and reattached the third party domain name in Squarespace.  We made these changes 68 hours ago, and within minutes were able to access our new Squarespace site correctly on the new domain, most of the time.

In a clean browser (ie. with an emptied cache) if I refresh www.our-domain.com sometimes I get old.squarespace.com and sometimes get new.squarespace.com.

The DNS Propagation Checker at whatismydns.net shows that the new, correct verify domain has propagated worldwide, which is the only DNS entry that changed, and the TTL was only 30 minutes in any case.

What could be causing this behaviour please?

Sometimes it happens fast, sometimes not. Usually the sites that are more important are down for longer times. Murphy's Law. Does ANYONE know how to avoid this? I'm open to ANY suggestions. ANYTHING....i'm not a programmer but there HAS to be a way around this. How do big ecommerce companies do this? You they can't be down for 72 hours......

2 hours ago, ddotcom12 said:

Does ANYONE know how to avoid [72 hours downtime]?

As I mentioned above, with some pre-planning it is possible to speed up website transfers.

The way to do this is to tweak the DNS records for your domain several days before the planned migration.

To explain, each DNS record has a TTL (Time to Live) value that specifies, in seconds, how long Internet Service Provider (ISP) should remember the DNS record before checking if the record has been updated. I'm simplifying here, but this is roughly what happens! Imagine that a customer checked your site 8 hours ago. If the TTL value was set to 86,400 seconds (24 hours) then their ISP will happily carry on using the website details that they used last time around, even if the website has been moved to a new provider. This means they'll see the old site and continue to see if for some hours/days to come. Only when the TTL has expired (after 86,400 seconds!) will their ISP check if the details have changed. Again, I'm simplifying to avoid a 4-page explanation, but this is roughly what happens. 

Domain name providers want you to have a high TTL setting (or long caching time) because it is much faster for every internet user to check the "cache" than it is to do a full lookup on a DNS server where the records are stored and edited. This greatly reduces internet traffic, gives a faster experience and saves the DNS hosting company money.

Of course the problem with having a high TTL setting is that if your ISP has already cached the current (old) IP address of your website, it won’t check for a DNS update for your domain until the TTL has passed, even if you've just updated the DNS records to point to a new website.

So the trick is to reduce the TTL of each DNS record (those that will change) to say 300 seconds (5 minutes) and to do this several days before you start the transfer. In fact, if the TTL is set to 24 hours, it should be at least three days beforehand. And when you have completed the changeover by editing the A and CNAME records to point to the new website, don't forget to change the TTL back to a more reasonable setting.

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I've been building websites since dial-up and I have never, ever seen a domain connection take as long as Squarespace does.