"DNS propagation takes up to 48 hours" is true but vague — the actual mechanism is TTL-governed caching at thousands of independent resolvers, each expiring on its own schedule. Here's how TTL actually controls this, why lowering TTL before a planned change matters, negative caching for new records, and why different users can genuinely see different DNS results during a transition.
Your computer's DNS settings and your browser's actual DNS resolution might be using completely different servers — DNS over HTTPS (DoH), increasingly implemented at the browser level, can bypass OS-level DNS settings entirely. Here's why DoH/DoT exist (encrypting DNS queries for privacy), why "dig shows the new record but my browser doesn't" can happen due to separate resolver caches, and how DoH interacts with network-level DNS filtering.
DNS cache poisoning, DNS hijacking, and DNS tunneling are real attack vectors. Here's how each works, what DNSSEC does (and doesn't) protect against, how to monitor your own DNS records for unexpected changes, and what domain shadowing is.
A practical reference for every DNS record type: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, NS, SOA, PTR, SRV, CAA — what each does, critical constraints, TTL strategy, and common use cases developers encounter regularly.
Learn how DNS works, what record types mean (A, MX, TXT, CNAME, NS), how to diagnose common DNS problems, and how to use a free DNS lookup tool to check any domain's records.
