how long does creating subdomains take?

[John Salerno]

Just out of curiosity, is it normal for a web host to take a few hours
to create a subdomain? 1and1 takes about 3 hours, but the other host I
was using created it immediately.

 

[jb]

Just out of curiosity, is it normal for a web host to take a few hours
to create a subdomain? 1and1 takes about 3 hours, but the other host I
was using created it immediately.

ten minutes?

 

[David Segall]

Just out of curiosity, is it normal for a web host to take a few hours
to create a subdomain? 1and1 takes about 3 hours, but the other host I
was using created it immediately.

On ZoneEdit it is "almost" immediate. If I try it immediately after
the save it fails. If I try again after that it works.

 

[Jim Moe]

Just out of curiosity, is it normal for a web host to take a few hours
to create a subdomain? 1and1 takes about 3 hours, but the other host I
was using created it immediately.

It depends on how long it takes for someone to make the addition to a
nameserver, and how long it takes for that information to propagate
through a network.

 

[jb]

Just out of curiosity, is it normal for a web host to take a few hours
to create a subdomain? 1and1 takes about 3 hours, but the other host I
was using created it immediately.

whatever.domain.com

 

[Andy Dingley]

Just out of curiosity, is it normal for a web host to take a few hours
to create a subdomain?

Some (manually) will take days. I've known it take weeks !

Technically it takes seconds locally, but it can take up to a couple of
days to propagate worldwide.

 

[Benjamin Niemann]

Just out of curiosity, is it normal for a web host to take a few hours
to create a subdomain? 1and1 takes about 3 hours, but the other host I
was using created it immediately.

1&1 is a pretty large hoster and I would not even try to estimate how many
requests they get that require a change of the DNS or apache configuration.
My guess is that in order to reduce the load on their systems they queue up
such requests and commit these in bulk every few hours.

 

[David Segall]

Some (manually) will take days. I've known it take weeks !

Technically it takes seconds locally, but it can take up to a couple of
days to propagate worldwide.

Why? I can understand a change of host address taking some time to
propagate because it can be cached at various places on the way. But I
think that the OP was asking about a new subdomain and I don't see how
that can be cached. Surely a request to resolve new.mydomain.com must
be referred to the nameserver since it need not have any relation to
the host of mydomain.com or old.mydomain.com.

 

[Steven Saunderson]

Why? I can understand a change of host address taking some time to
propagate because it can be cached at various places on the way. But I
think that the OP was asking about a new subdomain and I don't see how
that can be cached. Surely a request to resolve new.mydomain.com must
be referred to the nameserver since it need not have any relation to
the host of mydomain.com or old.mydomain.com.

Quite right. Whenever I've done it the new subdomain can be found as
soon as the DNS zone info is saved. The first name search might take a
little longer but that is the extent of the delay. However, if people
on other servers only queue their updates the delay could be much
longer.