17 May Why are .ie domains slow to propagate?
If you have ever changed hosting on a .ie domain you might have noticed they are very slow to update. A dot com for example will take an hour to six hours in my experience to change over or propagate its changes across all the DNS in every country.
The reason the .ie Domain space is slow is on purpose, the refresh rate is set to be slow.
How often does WeAre formerly the IEDR refresh the .ie domain space?
You would imagine at least every minute, every hour, well you are wrong it’s every odd hour, this works out to the following:
- 01:00 (1 am)
- 03:00 (3 am)
- 05:00 (5 am)
- 07:00 (7 am)
- 09:00(9 am)
- 11:00 (11 am)
- 13:00 (1 pm)
- 15:00 (3 pm)
- 17:00 (5 pm)
- 19:00 (7 pm)
- 21:00 (9 pm)
- 23:00 (11 pm)
So if you change your NS or Nameservers to point to a new fancy host for WordPress and are on the ‘local’ Irish domain, it will take hours for this process to even begin.
Compare this to a .com, what I recommend to all clients, which can take minutes to update and a few hours to fully propagate.
Local ccTLDs are in many ways a flawed starting point for any brand but for larger companies this is also an issue, in 2021 I would propose the IEDR spend less time rebranding, which it did during COVID and more time on the backbone of its allegedly fantastic local domain. For 4-5 times the cost of a .com you would expect at least the same speed and backbone. Unfortunately its a very over priced and slow domain space.