How do I refresh my DNS?
January 24, 2008
A reader writes:
“My old webhost told me that once I’d transferred to the new host, I’d have to ‘refresh’ my DNS. I tried hitting ctrl+f5 but that didn’t work. Can you help?
Hi there!
Ctrl+f5 is the windows browser refresh, its not quite the same as what your old host means. However, its hard, sometimes, to tell when you’ve moved.
There’s a simple way to check whether you’ve moved. Firstly you can check your nameservers (after changing them) at http://dnsreport.com - this site will let you see lots of information about your server that is hosting you.
Once you’ve made sure your nameservers are swapped over, you can run the following on your own desktop and you’ll be able to update your DNS at your end (though, note, this doesn’t always work)
Go to start - run - cmd
It will open up a DOS style box -
Type ipconfig /flushdns
(there is a space between the /(slash) and ipconfig
It should give you the following message:
Successfully flushed the DNS resolver cache
Type ipconfig/registerdns
(there is a space between the /(slash) and the end of ipconfig)
It will give you another message that tells you that it is re-registering your DNS and that you’ll see any errors in a log.
This will (hopefully) allow you to get any updates to the DNS cache and flush the files that stores these - giving you a better chance of seeing whether you’ve moved to a new server.
NOTE - there’s one extra step to this in Vista.
To do this in Vista, you must be ‘running’ your command line box as an administrator. To do that, go into your start menu –>All programs–>Accessories –> Command prompt and RIGHT CLICK on your command prompt icon, to select the option ‘run as administrator’. If you cannot see this option, you may need to log in as the administrator, if you can.
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