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......

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

On 3/24/2023 at 9:21 AM, PattyB said:

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

Seriously.  Google domains let me change the TTL but squarespace won't so now I'm stuck waiting. 

I have a .ai from NameCheap. I followed the instructions and it has been 48 hours. That is WAY longer than this process ever takes. Anyone else experience this? What can I do to confirm everything is done correctly? The instructions were followed exactly but this is ridiculously long.

Keeping things simple, would like to understand why in the world TTL (Priority) box is greyed out, even though it is available before adding custom dns record, eventually it greys out. Also when Im  trying to transfer a domain from other registrar to squarespace it does not give an option of automatically moving existing dns records nor add custom records so that we do not see any outage once the transfer is completed. any inputs will be appreciated.

This sucks. 24 hrs is reasonable. Anything above that is plain carelessness. This is not developer friendly.

I've been creating websites since geocities days.

I've never encountered slower DNS propagation as I have with SquareSpace. I registered a domain at 10pm tonight and immediately updated the DNS to point to my server. It's been 4 hours and my domain is still not resolving at all. This is absolutely not normal behavior by any means, Google Domains would've updated and propagated within the hour. Like the person who commented before me, how in the hell did we go from Google Domains to this...?!

I registered my new domain with SquareSpace thinking it'd be just as good as Google Domains and 4 hours in I'm already regretting my decision..............

Currently dealing with this also.  All DNS checker sites and manual server checks show complete propagation but Squarespace still said pending for hours and hours.  The traffic is going there....why can't they just serve up the correct site like a normal hosting environment??  Also, 1 domain says SSL processing and another domain says SSL unavailable. I guess I can't manually install my own SSL certs to avoid the Squarespace downtime...how convenient. Has anyone ever tried pre-verifying their squarespace site by only doing the "verify" CNAME record? Maybe this way you can still have your A records point to your old site, and then change then over to Squarespace once they catch up to the rest of the internet hours later...  😐

This experience has really made me question building my site on Squarespace

Edited to add:  I did contact Squarespace support about this.  It seems like their staff is trained to basically tell you to buzz off if its not beyond 72 hours and will not even look into the issue.  One tech asked to see a screenshot of my DNS records which I provided but thats as far as I got, they basically said "looks good to us, check back in a couple days"

I've been waiting for 3 days and still dealing with propagation issues. It even hicupped at one point and worked for a few hours then website went down. I checked whatsmypropagation and servers in the US fluctuate from checked to unchecked. Today 3 out of 5 states show working then tomorrow 4 out of 5 and it'll always be a different set of states. I agree with previous comment but there seems to be a lack of engineering behind the propagation on squarespace.

My domains got transferred from google to this crap hole and same issues I can not get my nameservers to go to Cloudflare without crazy long waits. Like beyond stupid longs waits, I've never in my life had to wait longer then maybe a few hours for DNS to propagation at most but Squarespace said hold my BEER! Why did google have to sell to such a crappy company.

Will be transferring all my domains off this dumpster fire to some place better.

On 4/24/2024 at 3:06 PM, PIkkonMG said:

My domains got transferred from google to this crap hole and same issues I can not get my nameservers to go to Cloudflare without crazy long waits. Like beyond stupid longs waits, I've never in my life had to wait longer then maybe a few hours for DNS to propagation at most but Squarespace said hold my BEER! Why did google have to sell to such a crappy company.

 

Will be transferring all my domains off this dumpster fire to some place better.

I also got problems since my domains got transferred from google and from godaddy. Why do I see the ssl certificate and www redirect if I setup my own nameservers ? It seems the propagation delay are huge with some countries.

Squarespace is terribly slow. Google domains rocked! Everything was instant and super easy. Never ever had any problems doing email and domain forwarding. Customer service response time is also very slow with Squarespace. I wish google domains would of remained in service.

Hello, my domain was migrated to Squarespace a few days ago from Google Domains.

Today, I wanted to add new records to my domain. The UI for it is good, but the speed of DNS propagation is a joke.

On Google Domains after editing the domain records, my changes were visible after about 2-5 minutes. On Squarespace I am waiting for a few hours now to see DNS records changes. Does anyone else face the same issue?

P.S. I am aware that DNS propagation can take up to 24-48 hours, but that is in the worst case scenario.

So, you automatically transfer my domain from Google, it's broken, I can't update anything, and I have to wait 48 hours for a ticket response? 

What a great company you have here.

Guess I don't have a team of lawyers so I'll have to wait.

Yes, I am unable to make updates and mine has been broken for days. I am waiting for a response to a ticket. Waiting days for updates while my site is down is just not acceptable.

I was hopeful when moving away from Google but now it looks like I need to find another registrar. 

Waiting this long for DNS replication and ticket response if just unacceptable.

From google to this S***.   Waiting for more than 14 hours  now.  

I am so disappointed with this, the propagation process is absolutely trash, my website and email settings for google workspace were not propagating to some places in the world, it was like that for over 3 weeks.

I made a business lose a lot of time over this and this business was not able to properly receive emails, which made them lose appointments.

I had to change to Cloudflare. And guess what, 12 hours into cloudflare, everything is on the whole world. Email setup and domain setup.

DO NOT USE squarespace, you will be much better if you rely on Cloudflare services, my experience has been horrible and could have affected my reputation as a service provider in this area.

Google has completely screwed us by passing off to a backwards utility where DNS propagation takes way, way longer than every other option out there and where TTL can't be updated for added DNS records.

Just got migrated from Google, and am having the same problem. There appears to be no way to set the TTL on DNS entries, and the default seems to be just about forever. It seems that Squarespace is being cheap and trying to limit the volume of requests on their DNS servers.

This apparently has been a long standing problem - does anyone from Squarespace actually monitor these forums?

5 hours ago, thalter said:

does anyone from Squarespace actually monitor these forums?

Nope 🙃 - please see number 7 on the Forum Guidelines for this.

Please see this forum post where the guidelines are linked from, Welcome to Squarespace Forum!

Sorry, I don't have news on this specific topic to help though. Sounds like just wait or contact Squarespace Support.

Hello Squarespace team!

Can you fix it or force people to move? It is a horrible problem that suggest your stack is old?