Glossary Entry
What is TTL?
What TTL actually means, buzzwords removed — with the example that makes it land.
The short answer
TTL is how long a cached DNS answer stays valid — the period resolvers may go on reusing it, and therefore how quickly your changes reach the world.
The rest of the page opens it up — the mechanics, why a site owner should care, and one concrete example of it at work.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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People, if you get stuck
Set it in hours and you reduce query volume while adding resilience. Drop to minutes and an edit reaches the world almost immediately. The trap that catches everybody once: the TTL governing any change is the one that was already in force before you made it.
Hence the standard migration drill of dropping the TTLs a day beforehand, making the switch, then putting them back. Propagation then runs to your timetable rather than yesterday's.
A way to picture TTL
The refresh cycle on a departure board. Each screen keeps showing its last download until its own cycle comes round, so publishing a new schedule this minute does nothing for the boards halfway through theirs.
Any analogy flattens the detail, naturally — but this one is solid enough to think with, and thinking is what a jargon buster is for.
Why this term earns a page
Once TTL makes sense, DNS work stops being nerve-racking and becomes scheduling. A planned move shrinks to a few minutes of overlap, and 'propagation is slow' becomes a number you chose rather than weather you have to endure.
Nobody expects you to work at this layer daily. The aim is recognising it when it explains something — and that moment is exactly when this page pays for itself.
One worked example
An admin planning a host move takes the A record's TTL from four hours down to five minutes the day before. On the night, the world catches up within minutes, and the TTL goes back up to hours the next morning.
Entirely unremarkable once you have seen it — which is the point: most hosting ideas are plain machinery behind an intimidating label.
Where it appears on this platform
You will meet it in the control panel and now and then in a support thread, usually already set correctly. If this one landed, the natural follow-ups are DNS, DNS Propagation, A Record and Nameserver.
Support means a person at any hour, and the remit covers the awkward practical questions other hosts hand straight back.
A jargon buster from the people who answer the tickets
An unexplained piece of jargon is, to us, a service defect. This is the support team's collected translations, published where a search engine can hand them over on our behalf.
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- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Clear about how deep to go
Most of these are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and every entry says which it is.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
Jargon-free by design
Definitions written for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — translation rather than restatement.
This term, properly landed
TTL defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Open the control panel and find where this idea sits — a definition turns into understanding the moment it attaches to your own site.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
The platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and your setup becomes something you know instead of hope.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — DNS, DNS Propagation and A Record finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- PHP versions set per site from the control panel
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
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- WordPress Toolkit, with the updates seen to for you
- cPanel, which is what most of the industry already runs
- NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not only the dear ones
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
What TTL should I use?
For records that never move, one to four hours strikes the balance between resilience and query volume. Anything you expect to change, or anything caught up in a planned migration, wants five minutes. Leaving everything permanently short simply taxes resolvers for agility you almost never use.
I lowered the TTL and the change still took hours. Why?
Because the old value applies first. Any resolver still holding four hours of your old record will go on ignoring the new five-minute value until that timer expires. Drop the TTL a full old-TTL cycle ahead of the change itself, at minimum.
Does hosting include mail?
Yes — every hosting plan includes mailboxes at your own name, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP plus spam filtering on from the start. There is standalone email hosting too, for a name whose website lives somewhere else.
Can I choose the PHP version myself?
Yes — PHP is set per site from the control panel, so a legacy application and a current one can run side by side in one account. Extensions and per-site tuning are on the same screen, and none of it goes near a support ticket.
Keep reading
A Record
An A record ties a hostname to an IPv4 address, and it is the DNS entry telling a browser which machine ser…
Nameserver
The machines authorised to answer DNS queries for your domain are its nameservers, and whoever operates the…
How to Reduce Server Response Time
A walkthrough to follow with the panel open in the next tab.
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