HostGator: 4-8 Hours for cPanel Subdomain Creation?

Hosting
1

OK so I asked HostGator customer support why my subdomains take time to show up after creating them in cPanel. (I go into cPanel and create a new subdomain but it won’t show up for me when I load the page in the browser).
They informed me that it takes 4-8 hours for subdomain creation within cPanel / WHM. It doesn’t matter if I go with Shared Host, VPS, or a private host - they will always take that amount of time to propagate. Is this only a case with HostGator? I was under the impression that new subdomains should be up and running instantaneously?

Thanks,

2

Doing a little search on Yahoo, it can take hours for a new subdomain to propagate. That said, there are things that may make it appear that it is taking longer for propagation to occur. For example, maybe your ISP is caching DNS data and when you try to look it up initially it finds nothing. Your computer might cache it, too, so you might want to try [URL=“http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG7l5TtKRQCnsAyrlXNyoA;_ylc=X1MDMjc2NjY3OQRfcgMyBGFvA2FvBGNzcmNwdmlkAzcxTnQ5VW9HN3Y0NEczNG9VS1N6TGd3dXouQlA1MUNrc3pRQUNxdDQEZnIDeWZwLXQtNzAxBGZyMgNzYnRuBG5fZ3BzAzEwBG9yaWdpbgNzcnAEcHFzdHIDZmx1c2ggRE5TBHF1ZXJ5A2ZsdXNoIEROUwRzYW8DMgR2dGVzdGlkA1ZJUDE3MA–?p=flush%20DNS&fr2=sb-top&fr=yfp-t-701&pqstr=flush%20DNS”]flushing your DNS.

In reality, I have not found any problems with long DNS propagation times for many years. In fact, just the other week I registered a new domain name and could access its parking page within a couple minutes of registering it. I keep my DNS with my domain name registrar, not with my web host. When I have created subdomains, I make the entry in cPanel to set up the subdomain, then go to my registrar’s DNS and make the necessary changes. I can usually access the subdomain right away.

Next time you set up a new subdomain, try accessing it through a proxy like hidemyass.com if you can’t reach it through your own browser. Then you can see how long propagation is really taking.

3

rl,

HostGator fed you a line … but cd is correct in that it could take up to 72 hours for a (sub?)domain to propagate.

Okay, I’ve NEVER had any problem accessing a new subdomain immediately but that may just be the host/ISP combination I have.

Regards,

DK

4

If the DNS that your domain name lookups go through is slow then you can update your connection to the internet to use one that updates faster. I use openDNS which means that on the rare occasion where I have changed ISP I have not had to change the IP addresses for the DNS from those used by the old ISP to those provided by the new ISP. Generally the only change required when I change ISP is the password to log in to my account with the new ISP and the outgoing mail server.

5

The subdomain is usually created immediately but in some cases it might take upto 48 hours to propagate throughout the internet.

6

This is true, but it actually can take as long as 72 hours (as DK mentioned above). I have on rare occasion had it take this long for DNS hosts that are normally really fast at propagating DNS.