What happens to your Email and Website after your Name Servers have been updated?

By Gavin Payne - More articles by this Author

(Please note - This article describes the process AFTER both: your website has been copied across to your new hosting provider, and your email accounts have been created on your new host's service.)

Once your Name Servers have been updated (often referred to as DNS and more accurately referred to as DNS servers) you can expect the following to happen with your website and email.

If you do a 'Whois query' for your domain name after you update your DNS servers you will notice it reflects the change almost immediately (from a registrar perspective), however the change duration will reflect differently for everyone. This sounds like a contradiction, but it's dependant on each individual's internet connection and how often their internet provider updates their cache. This determines how long it takes them to see the change. It can take a few minutes or a number of hours to reflect correctly for everybody around the world.*

Website:

Nothing should noticeably happen to your website.

As long as, both your 'current hosting service' and your 'new hosting service' are active.

You will however experience downtime if you cancel your "old" hosting service before the transfer has fully completed to the new one.

And obviously you would need to copy your site (and database) across to the new location first...so the domain has somewhere to point to!

Technically what will happen during the Name Server change is, your visitors will either be directed to the "old" location or the "new" location. In other words, they will go somewhere, to one or the other. They won't necessarily know if it is the new or old location (just by looking at the site), but that doesn't matter, as your website will remain available to everyone.

Email:

Email will simply start being sent to the new location and to the corresponding email addresses that are already setup with the new host.

Please note: The email addresses need to exist with the new host first, otherwise when they are told by the new Name Server details to go to the new location, they won't have anywhere to go. So they need to be created again!

Here are some recommendations and a foolproof method of what to do before and after the DNS server changes occur:

1. Ping mail.yourdomain.com.au to get your current mail server's IP address and make a note of it.
2.Update DNS at about 4 or 5pm (or, if you can, a weekend is even better), by morning it should all be changed and reflecting correctly for everyone. The New Sprout Nameservers are:

Nameserver1: ns.otherdns.com
Nameserver2: ns.otherdns.net

(Please Note: You can make changes to your domain name details as well as manage your Nameservers for your domain all under the "My Domains" section through your single My Account login)

3. Keep checking your email as you currently do, until the following morning.
4. You can log into your new host's webmail if you think you are missing any emails, typically something like www.yourdomain.com.au/webmail.
5. The following morning you can update your Outlook or Email client settings, but before you do it, change your Incoming Server details to the old "mail server's" IP address (the one you made a note of above) and do a Send/Receive to clear out any last email that may have still found its way to the old location.
6. You can then update your username, password and Incoming and Outgoing Servers to the new details (some or all of these may stay the same, depending on your new provider's details).

* By the way, Domain Transfers are different, they can take up to 48 hours for .au domains and up to 5 days for global TLD (or .com, .net, etc.) domains. The Name Servers aren't changed, it is just the actual Registrar that changes. Everything else remains the same until you decide to update the Name Servers.