Site switching back and fourth after changing nameservers

Question

I just updated the nameservers on an addon domain and over the last 12 hours, the domain has been totally inconsistent about which server will load when I refresh the page. This is from the same computer. One minute it's from the old server, then it's from the new one, then an hour later, the old one again.

Is this normal? Is this an indicator of a bad hosting company? Is there a way to force my computer to pick one or the other so I can continue a little work on the site until it is done resolving?

Answer 1

It could possibly sound like you by mistake have set up round-robin DNS records for the domain, by adding a new record for the domain name pointing to the new server, while keeping the old record pointing to the old one. It could potentially give the symptoms you are seeing, where your client is picking one of the two records at random.

If you just want to make sure you always hit a specific server of the two, you should into adding an entry to the "hosts" file on your client. It is either found at %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows or /etc/hosts on Linux/Unix/OS X.