The results showed that it was: Example of whatsmydns CNAME resolutionĪfter all this digging, we confirmed that there was a small change with the client’s DNS provider that was still cached on their end. We wanted to ensure that the site was loading fine everywhere, beyond just our physical location, and that it was resolving back to the client’s CDN provider. This tool enables users to quickly check the resolution on DNS records (such as the CDN CNAME) from multiple geographical locations. We then ran the client’s CDN URL through the free whatsmydns tool. The first thing we did was ping the CDN subdomain to see if we could access it. Upon inspecting their site with Chrome Devtools, we could see that everything coming from their CDN subdomain ( ) wasn’t loading correctly, and instead was reporting 404 errors. The site appeared to be loading just fine for us, however, and the client hadn’t made any recent changes. The client reached out to us because their images, CSS, and JavaScript weren’t loading correctly on their website. To illustrate the point further, let’s look at an example that actually happened to a Kinsta client’s website. In any of these situations, clearing your DNS cache can often help you resolve the problem and get back online. It can also simply become outdated or create internet connectivity issues. Unfortunately, your DNS cache may become corrupted, leading you into phishing schemes. This enables your browser to reload sites you’ve visited in the past more quickly than if it had to reference the DNS again each time.

So, DNS caching involves your Operating System (OS) or browser capturing recently-visited IP addresses and saving them in a database. As for ‘caching’, it’s the process of saving a snapshot of something (such as a web page) so it can be reloaded faster in the future. You can think of it as a directory or phone book for websites. In order to understand why you may need to flush your DNS cache, there are several components we need to break down.įirst, the Domain Name System (DNS) is an index of all the websites on the internet and their IP addresses.

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