For those who are sick of waiting for dns propagation

DNS propagation can take anywhere from hours to days, but there is one easy fix around this.
If your site isn’t receiving much traffic, chances are, only your dns provider has the dns records for your domain cached. If this is the case, when you [ temporarily ] change your dns, for example from the one your isp provides to something like 1.1.1.1, your dns will be fetched directly from InfinityFree/iFastNet’s servers (again, assuming no one else has visited your site with the same dns provider).

This is useful if you changed the hosting account of a domain or recently changed your dns (on your custom domain)

However, this does not work for the free ssl certificates that InfinityFree provides, as InfinityFree checks for the cname record before adding it, and you can’t change the dns of InfinityFree.
It would be nice if the ssl certificate system didn’t automatically check for dns records and instead had a big “Check for records” button instead. It could save a lot of time.

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Switching DNS providers is definitely a good idea! That’s why we also included it in our guide:

The DNS change doesn’t have the be temporary. A good, fast DNS resolver can help speed up all your online activities (depending on how good or bad the default resolver is).

It should be noted though that your computer may also have DNS cache (Windows notably does) which may also have the incorrect entries. Editing the hosts file (also noted in the article) works even more reliably.

And in any case, updating your own resolver only affects how fast changes are visible for you. Everyone else in the world will have their own DNS resolver which may still be serving the old records.

The CNAME checker does not use any resolver at all. It looks up and directly queries the authoritative nameservers of your domain (the nameservers you can find at the top of the page). It maintains a 60 second internal cache (because it does have to do quite a few DNS lookups to show all the information), which is much shorter than the original record TTL of 24 hours.

The nameservers themselves also don’t seem to always push through changes instantly. Even when querying the nameservers directly from the command line (again, no resolvers), it can take up to 15 minutes for the new DNS records to go live.

The places where we don’t do direct querying, the client area uses Google resolvers instead of Cloudflare ones. Why? Because performance wise they are close enough, but Google maintains even shorter cache in my experience than Cloudflare.

I completely understand that it’s frustrating to have to wait for DNS propagation for the CNAME changes. But I can assure you that there are no quick fixes to speed it up. Trust me, I’ve put plenty of effort into trying to make it as seamless as possible.

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