The Time to Live (TTL) of a domain name tells other DNS servers how long to keep a DNS record in their cache after it has been queried. The default TTL is set to 1 hour. This means that when someone looks up your website, they receive the IP address from our DNS servers. Our DNS servers then specify that the requesting DNS server should cache that record for 1 hour before querying it again.

Under the Zone Management interface, you can adjust the TTL for your domain name to as short as 5 minutes. This means that any records requested will have a maximum cache time of 5 minutes.

Examples of Use

Lowering the TTL before making a record change will reduce the update time for the new record. This is ideal when transferring web hosting providers, mail hosts, or changing your office's static IP address, as it helps minimize downtime while the new record propagates. First, lower the TTL, then wait a few hours for the previous TTL cache to expire before changing your record. Once the switch is complete, reset the TTL to a more reasonable duration, such as 1 or 3 hours.

You might choose to use a 5-minute TTL permanently if you have a backup web host or failover site available. In the event that your primary host is unavailable, you can log in and quickly update the DNS record to point to your backup host, with a maximum time of only 5 minutes before the changes take effect.