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Originally Posted by LusciousDelight

I've always wondered how much affect the nameserver has on the time it takes to resolve. I haven't done enough transfers to really know for sure, but GoDaddy seems to take much longer than Namecheap, from my very limited experience. I didn't know that was something the nameserver had any control over.

When a surfer clicks on a link to, say, pornurl.org, the following occurs:

1. The surfer's computer checks its hosts file. Is there an entry there? Of course, there rarely is.
2. The surfer's computer then checks with its DNS server as defined in its network settings.
3. The DNS server checks to see if it is authoritative for the domain. If so, it provides the data. Of course, this is also rarely the case. (It would only be the case if your surfer's DNS server happened to be that of the company hosting your domain. For practical purposes, this just doesn't happen).
4. If the server is not authoritative, it determine if it has data cached for the given domain. If you've ever wondered about those TTL, Refresh, Expires, etc. settings for your DNS, those control this behavior. While we like to set short refresh values, so that hosting changes propagate immediately, you should keep in mind that if you have a longer value, DNS servers can cache the data longer, meaning they're more likely to be able to give a response right here ... without going through additional steps.
5. If the server is not authoritative and has no data cached, then it looks for the name server for the top level domain (.com, .net, .org, .us, etc.). It queries this server for the name servers of your domain. The root server replies, providing your domain's DNS servers IP addresses.
6. The server contacts your DNS server, requesting the IP address of your site. If your first server fails to respond, it should contact additional servers whose addresses were provided in the previous step.
7. The server returns the IP address to you.

You'll notice that nowhere in here is your *registrar* contacted... unless they happen to be providing your DNS for you. The only role your registrar plays is in updating the root server with the correct IP addresses of your DNS servers. If this changes, and your registrar is slow, it will take longer for the changes to propagate, but there's no impact on live queries.

Hope this helps.

-jbn