So you found a perfect domain name that was not already taken, figured out how to register it, paid for hosting (leasing space to store all the files that will be publicly accessed as web pages) with a WHP - aka Web Hosting Provider (such as bsleek.com) and even uploaded your website to the WHP's servers, or had a professional design firm create a web site for you.

Alas, it looks like the results of your hard work, of your money spending and of the headaches you got from trying to make sense of all the techno babble were in vain? Why can't you see your website instantly - after all, is't this the promise of the e-commerce age?? Hey, when they took your credit card payment, that went pretty fast!! Is it that nobody really cares about customer service anymore? And what is this "propagation" nonsense those techies are trying to bamboozle you with?

Is your new Web Host Provider a lemon? Did you make a big mistake choosing it??

All this has to be very frustrating, unless you understand exactly how things work. Over the next few paragraphs, I will try to demystify the DNS propagation process, by telling you in plain English, what DNS propagation is, how it works, and why is it that the only thing we can do to speed the process up is.... wait.

DNS stands for Domain Name Server. I know the word Server is intimidating and you are thinking "oh sure, another article written in technicalese language". Think of a server as a regular computer, like the one you are using now to read this. That's right! Your beloved computer can be a server too. We call a computer a server when that machine is up and running and providing a service ("serving" something, whether a web page, a text document, etc.)

With the language barrier lowered, I will tell you that DNS can be tricky, especially when first registering a domain name or transferring your website to a web hosting provider. The strangest things can happen that would lead you to believe that your new web hosting provider is at fault.

99.99% of the time the Web Hosting Provider is not to blame and I will explain why.