… Your Website to Go Live

We’re a web marketing company. What else would this blog be about?

Over the course of working on projects, our clients will invariably ask one or all of the following questions as we approach the launch of their site.

What better way to address these questions than a blog post?

(1) What is involved in bringing a site live?

One day your website is on a development server with a weird-looking testing URL, and the next day it’s live. How does that happen?

Magic.

Okay, it’s not magic, it’s DNS.

DNS stands for Domain Name System. DNS is a naming system for any computer or service that is connected to the Internet. It takes a domain name (lyntonweb.com) that humans understand and converts it into something that a computer understands (beep boop beeeep). No, just kidding. DNS changes the domain name into an IP address, which is a series of four numbers between 0 and 255. For example, Google’s IP address is 74.125.224.72 (try putting that in your browser’s address bar).

When we bring a site live, we edit the DNS zone record for your domain name to point to the IP address that is associated with your new server.

(2) Who on my team should be involved?

If you’re a larger company, you may have an IT department at your disposal. If you do, your IT manager will know exactly what to do to bring your site live.

If you’re not lucky enough to have a team of super computer engineers, your friendly web marketing agency (Hi!) can help.

(3) When is the best time to take my site live?

There are a few things to take into consideration before answering this question:

• Is your new site a redesign with new content?
• How much traffic does your site receive?
• Does your site sit on multiple servers with advanced technology such as a shopping cart or web app?

We generally like to push new websites live on Friday afternoons, even if it’s a simple redesign.

Why is that? When you update the DNS of a domain name, you get a message saying that the process could take anywhere from 24-48 hours to fully resolve.

For the most part, we see the update happen anywhere from 2-6 hours, sometimes a little longer.

The reason that we like to do launches on Fridays (besides ending the work week on a serious up-note) is that it gives the site the entire weekend to resolve across the Internet, so come Monday morning, visitors are definitely seeing the new site.

However, sometimes you need to push a site live in the middle of the week, and that is totally fine, too. For those situations, we still make the DNS update in the afternoon so that if there is any downtime (there usually isn’t), it’s at a low-traffic time, and then the site can resolve overnight.

So, now that you know what happens once your site is ready to go live, why don’t you contact us so we can go through this process of bringing your new website into the world together?

This article originally appeared on LyntonWeb.