Diagnosing Problems With Custom Domains - A Caveat

When you work on a custom domain, and the work takes you a few tries while you make one setting, tweak another setting, then republish something, maybe make a change in a post or two, note two issues that may affect your efforts. C a c h e and D N S L a t e n c y.

Besides being dependent upon blog content, examination of custom domain publishing also depends upon DNS content.

• Both blog content and DNS content are subject to caching.
• Transmission of DNS content from the DNS Host (generally, but not always, provided by your domain registrar) to your local DNS server (generally, but not always, provided by your ISP) is affected by DNS Latency.

When you're trying to correct a problem with a custom domain setup, if you want predictable results from any change that you make, you're going to have to deal with both issues. Any change you make may not show up immediately, because of caching and / or latency, and with both issues involved in a given problem, there are possibilities of confusion. If you make two changes, and don't exercise patience, clear caches, and test after the first, you may not be able to diagnose a problem as effectively as you should. For best results

1. Make one change.
2. If your change involves DNS settings, wait - in some cases "up to 24 hours".
3. Clear caches - both browser and DNS.
4. Test results.
5. Repeat as necessary.

This is lots more work than it should be, but when you start running into problems, and the problems don't resolve predictably, or the diagnostic results just don't make sense, you'd better slow down a bit, and work methodically.

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